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    <H1>Down and Out<BR>in the<BR>Magic Kingdom</H1>
    <H2>Cory Doctorow</H2>
    <P>Copyright © 2003 Cory Doctorow</P>
    <P><A href="mailto:doctorow@craphound.com">doctorow@craphound.com</A></P>
    <P><A href="http://www.craphound.com/down">http://www.craphound.com/down</A></P>
    <P>Tor Books, January 2003</P>
    <P>ISBN: 0765304368</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="toc" dir="LTR" style="background: #eeff77">
    <H1><FONT size="2">Table of Contents</FONT></H1>
    <UL>
        <LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#blurbs">Blurbs</A>
        </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#aboutnew">About
        this book: Feb 12, 2004</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#about">About this book: Jan 9, 2003</A>
        </FONT>
        </P>
    </LI></UL>
    <UL>
        <LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#prologue">PROLOGUE</A>
        </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch1">CHAPTER
        1</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch2">CHAPTER
        2</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch3">CHAPTER
        3</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch4">CHAPTER
        4</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch5">CHAPTER
        5</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch6">CHAPTER
        6</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch7">CHAPTER
        7</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch8">CHAPTER
        8</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch9">CHAPTER
        9</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ch10">CHAPTER 10</A> </FONT>
        </P>
    </LI></UL>
    <UL>
        <LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ack">Acknowledgments</A>
        </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#ata">About
        the Author</A> </FONT>
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P><FONT size="2"><A href="http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm#alsoby">Other books by Cory Doctorow</A>
        </FONT>
        </P>
    </LI></UL>
</DIV>
<DIV id="blurbs" dir="LTR">
    <H1>Blurbs:</H1>
    <P>He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the
    furniture! Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow!</P>
    <P>Bruce Sterling</P>
    <P>Author, <I>The Hacker Crackdown</I> and <I>Distraction</I></P>
    <P>In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of
    our common culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into
    our culture a new set of memes that will be with us for a generation
    at least.</P>
    <P>Lawrence Lessig</P>
    <P>Author, <I>The Future of Ideas</I></P>
    <P>Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future&nbsp;–&nbsp;I think he lives there. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn't
    just a really good read, it's also, like the best kind
    of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the Tomorrowland of Tomorrow
    today, and while you're there, why not drop by
    Frontierland, and the Haunted Mansion as well? (It's the
    Mansion that's the haunted heart of this book.) Cory
    makes me feel nostalgic for the future&nbsp;–&nbsp;a dizzying, yet rather pleasant sensation, as if I'm
    spiraling down the tracks of Space Mountain over and over again.
    Visit the Magic Kingdom and live forever!</P>
    <P>Kelly Link</P>
    <P>Author, <I>Stranger Things Happen</I></P>
    <P>Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and
    exciting science fiction story I've read in the last few
    years. I love page-turners, especially when they are as unusual as
    this novel. I predict big things for Down and Out—it
    could easily become a breakout genre-buster.</P>
    <P>Mark Frauenfelder</P>
    <P>Contributing Editor, <I>Wired Magazine</I></P>
    <P>Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the
    world. Not only that, but money's been abolished and
    somebody's developed the Cure for Death. Welcome to the
    Bitchun Society—and make sure you're
    strapped in tight, because it's going to be a wild ride.
    In a world where everyone's wishes can come true, one
    man returns to the original, crumbling city of dreams—Disney
    World. Here in the spiritual center of the Bitchun Society he
    struggles to find and preserve the original, human face of the Magic
    Kingdom against the young, post-human and increasingly alien
    inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated,
    human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the
    corny, mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem
    like a precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the
    simulated, the true from the false.</P>
    <P>Cory Doctorow—cultural critic, Disneyphile, and
    ultimate Early Adopter—uses language with the reckless
    confidence of the Beat poets. Yet behind the dazzling prose and
    vibrant characters lie ideas we should all pay heed to. The future
    rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it's
    hard to see where we're going. But at least with this
    book Doctorow has given us a map of the park.</P>
    <P>Karl Schroeder</P>
    <P>Author, <I>Permanence</I></P>
    <P>Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've
    come across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF
    writers' speculations end. It's a distinct
    pleasure to give him some Whuffie.</P>
    <P>Rudy Rucker</P>
    <P>Author, <I>Spaceland</I></P>
    <P>Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day,
    because he's always one of the first to notice a major
    incursion from the social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his
    voice is a compelling vehicle for news from the future. Down and Out
    in The Magic Kingdom is about a world that is visible in its
    outlines today, if you know where to look, from reputation systems
    to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to look, and how
    to word-paint the rest of us into the picture.</P>
    <P>Howard Rheingold</P>
    <P>Author, <I>Smart Mobs</I></P>
    <P>Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the
    perceptions of those whose realities remain uncorrupted - though
    that should be enough recommendation to read his work. <EM>Down and
    Out in the Magic Kingdom</EM> is black comedic, sci-fi prophecy on
    the dangers of surrendering our consensual hallucination to the
    regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep afterwards.</P>
    <P>Douglas Rushkoff</P>
    <P>Author of <I>Cyberia</I> and <I>Media Virus!</I></P>
    <P>“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the
    reputation economy, and Ray Kurzweil's transhuman
    future. As much fun as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and
    as packed with mind bending ideas about social changes cascading
    from the frontiers of science.”</P>
    <P>Tim O'Reilly</P>
    <P>Publisher and Founder, O'Reilly and Associates</P>
    <P>Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future,
    and then wrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn't
    put the book down.</P>
    <P>Bruce Schneier</P>
    <P>Author, <I>Secrets and Lies</I></P>
    <P>Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring,
    savvy, entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to
    the wired world of the twenty-first century that stretches out
    before us as you're going to find.</P>
    <P>Gardner Dozois</P>
    <P>Editor, <I>Asimov's SF</I></P>
    <P>Cory Doctorow's “Down and Out in the Magic
    Kingdom” tells a gripping,
    fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from
    today's technical realities. This is the sort of book
    that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human
    history when our tools remake ourselves and our world.</P>
    <P>Mitch Kapor</P>
    <P>Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="aboutnew" dir="LTR">
    <H1>A note about this book, February 12, 2004:</H1>
    <P>As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I
    released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a
    Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely
    redistribute the text without needing any further permission from
    me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand
    experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural
    relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very
    satisfactorily.</P>
    <P>When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in
    the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion
    possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my
    toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would
    fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that
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    penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I
    had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved"
    regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic
    fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.</P>
    <P>It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection
    (<A href="http://craphound.com/place">A Place So Foreign and Eight
    More</A> and a second novel (<A href="http://craphound.com/est">Eastern
    Standard Tribe</A>) in this fashion, and my career is turning over
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    <P>And so <EM>now</EM> I'm going to take a little bit of a plunge.
    Today, in coincidence with my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging
    Technology Conference (<A href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4693">Ebooks:
    Neither E, Nor Books</A>).</P>
    <P>I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative
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    This is a license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially
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    <P><A name="license"></A>Here's the license in summary:</P>
    <P><A href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/">http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/</A></P>
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    <BLOCKQUOTE>And here is the license in full:</BLOCKQUOTE>
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<DIV id="about" dir="LTR">
    <H1>A note about this book, January 9, 2003:</H1>
    <P>“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It's an actual, no-foolin'
    words-on-paper book, published by the good people at Tor Books in
    New York City. You can buy this book in stores or online, by
    following links like this one:</P>
    <P><A href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765304368/downandoutint-20">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765304368/downandoutint-20</A></P>
    <P>So, what's with this file? Good question. 
    </P>
    <P>I'm releasing the entire text of this book as a free,
    freely redistributable e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P
    net, put it on your site, email it to a friend, and, if you're
    addicted to dead trees, you can even print it. 
    </P>
    <P>Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story,
    but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe.
    Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to
    throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on
    word-of-mouth. I'm not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a
    blog, Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net), where I do a <EM>lot</EM>
    of word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about
    things that I like. 
    </P>
    <P>And telling people about stuff I like is <EM>way</EM>, <EM>way</EM>
    easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier.</P>
    <P>What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of
    the books, music and movies ever released are not available for
    sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have
    flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put
    just about <EM>everything</EM> online. What's more,
    they've done it for cheaper than any other
    archiving/revival effort ever. I'm a stone infovore and
    this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson of
    futurosity. 
    </P>
    <P>Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to
    figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is
    a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation,
    freedom, business, and whatnot. It's your basic
    end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction
    writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my
    stock-in-trade.</P>
    <P>I'm especially grateful to my publisher, Tor Books
    (<A href="http://www.tor.com/">http://www.tor.com</A>) and my
    editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden
    (<A href="http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite">http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite</A>)
    for being hep enough to let me try out this experiment.</P>
    <P>All that said, here's the deal: I'm
    releasing this book under a license developed by the Creative
    Commons project (<A href="http://creativecommons.org/">http://creativecommons.org/</A>).
    This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license
    agreements for the distribution of our creative work under terms
    similar to those employed by the Free/Open Source Software movement.
    It's a great project, and I'm proud to be a
    part of it. 
    </P>
    <P><A name="license1"></A>Here's a summary of the
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</DIV>
<DIV id="prologue" dir="LTR">
    <H1>PROLOGUE</H1>
    <P>I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of
    the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three
    symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in
    Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.</P>
    <P>I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep
    A-Movin' Dan would decide to deadhead until the heat
    death of the Universe.</P>
    <P>Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met
    him, sometime late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so,
    all rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and
    infinitely comfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my
    fourth Doctorate, and he was taking a break from Saving the World,
    chilling on campus in Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro
    major. We hooked up at the Grad Students' Union—the
    GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew—on a busy Friday night,
    summer-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool at the
    scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the press of bodies
    shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a litter of
    cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.</P>
    <P>Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised
    a sun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and
    we're going to have to get a pre-nup.”</P>
    <P>I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being
    called son, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had
    enough realtime that he could call me son anytime he wanted. I
    backed off a little and apologized.</P>
    <P>He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the
    bartender's head. “Don't worry
    about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed to
    personal space.”</P>
    <P>I couldn't remember the last time I'd
    heard anyone on-world talk about personal space. With the mortality
    rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero, the world was
    inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the
    migratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You've
    been jaunting?” I asked—his
    eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant's
    experience to deadheading.</P>
    <P>He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I'm into the
    kind of macho shitheadery that you only come across on-world.
    Jaunting's for play; I need work.” The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.</P>
    <P>I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I
    had to resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit
    on my standard display. I tried to act cool, but he caught the
    upwards flick of my eyes and then their involuntary widening. He
    tried a little aw-shucksery, gave it up and let a prideful grin
    show.</P>
    <P>“I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get
    overly grateful.” He must've
    seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history. “Wait,
    don't go doing that—I'll tell
    you about it, you really got to know.</P>
    <P>“Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used
    to life without hyperlinks. You'd think you'd
    really miss 'em, but you don't.”</P>
    <P>And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of
    those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society
    to the benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons,
    they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's
    amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in
    the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The
    missionaries don't have such a high success rate—you
    have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's
    already successfully resisted nearly a century's worth
    of propaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you
    accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries
    end up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't
    heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met one in the
    flesh before.</P>
    <P>“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked.</P>
    <P>“Figured it out, huh? I've just come off
    my fifth in twenty years—counterrevolutionaries hidden
    out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD site, still there a
    generation later.” He sandpapered
    his whiskers with his fingertips. “Their parents went to
    ground after their life's savings vanished, and they had
    no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle. Plenty of those,
    though.”</P>
    <P>He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the
    acceptance of the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then
    betrayed it in subtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to
    their greenhouses, then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a
    couple deaths, slowly inching them toward the Bitchun Society, until
    they couldn't remember why they hadn't
    wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they were mostly
    off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and
    unlimited supplies and deadheading through the dull times en route.</P>
    <P>“I guess it'd be too much of a shock for
    them to stay on-world. They think of us as the enemy, you
    know—they had all kinds of plans drawn up for when we
    invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth, booby-traps,
    fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They just can't
    get over hating us, even though we don't even know they
    exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they're still
    living rough and hard.” He rubbed
    his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But
    for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. The little
    enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what
    if we'd taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What
    if we'd taken deadheading, but only for the critically
    ill, not for people who didn't want to be bored on long
    bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is
    different and wonderful.”</P>
    <P>I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found
    myself saying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than,
    oh, let's see, dying, starving, freezing, broiling,
    killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain and misery. I know I sure
    miss it.”</P>
    <P>Keep A-Movin' Dan snorted. “You think a
    junkie misses sobriety?”</P>
    <P>I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren't
    any junkies anymore!”</P>
    <P>He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie <EM>is</EM>,
    right? Junkies don't miss sobriety, because they don't
    remember how sharp everything was, how the pain made the joy
    sweeter. We can't remember what it was like to work to
    earn our keep; to worry that there might not be <EM>enough</EM>,
    that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don't
    remember what it was like to take chances, and we sure as shit
    don't remember what it felt like to have them pay
    off.”</P>
    <P>He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood,
    and already ready to toss it all in and do something, <EM>anything</EM>,
    else. He had a point—but I wasn't about to
    admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance when I
    strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love… and what about the deadheads? Two people I know, they just went
    deadhead for ten thousand years! Tell me that's not
    taking a chance!” Truth be told,
    almost everyone I'd known in my eighty-some years were
    deadheading or jaunting or just <EM>gone</EM>. Lonely days, then.</P>
    <P>“Brother, that's committing half-assed
    suicide. The way we're going, they'll be
    lucky if someone doesn't just switch 'em off
    when it comes time to reanimate. In case you haven't
    noticed, it's getting a little crowded around here.”</P>
    <P>I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a
    bar-napkin—the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights.
    “Uh-huh, just like the world was getting a little crowded
    a hundred years ago, before Free Energy. Like it was getting too
    greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold. We fixed it then,
    we'll fix it again when the time comes. I'm
    gonna be here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think
    I'll do it the long way around.”</P>
    <P>He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had
    been any of the other grad students, I'd have assumed he
    was grepping for some bolstering factoids to support his next sally.
    But with him, I just knew he was thinking about it, the
    old-fashioned way.</P>
    <P>“I think that if I'm still here in ten
    thousand years, I'm going to be crazy as hell. Ten
    thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art
    was a goat. You really think you're going to be anything
    recognizably human in a hundred centuries? Me, I'm not
    interested in being a post-person. I'm going to wake up
    one day, and I'm going to say, ‘Well, I guess
    I've seen about enough,’ and that'll
    be my last day.”</P>
    <P>I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying
    attention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid
    more attention. “But why? Why not just deadhead for a few
    centuries, see if there's anything that takes your
    fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a few more? Why do anything so
    <EM>final</EM>?”</P>
    <P>He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again,
    making me feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I
    suppose it's because nothing else is. I've
    always known that someday, I was going to stop moving, stop seeking,
    stop kicking, and have done with it. There'll come a day
    when I don't have anything left to do, except stop.”</P>
    <HR>
</DIV>
<P>On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin' Dan, because
of his cowboy vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew
to take over every conversation I had for the next six months. I
pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing
steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met.</P>
<P>I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all
the savings from the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking
myself stupid at the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering
profs, until I'd expended all the respect anyone had ever
afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to
regular beers and meals and movies.</P>
<P>I got to feeling like I was someone special—not
everyone had a chum as exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the
legendary missionary who visited the only places left that were
closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't say for sure why
he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he'd
liked my symphonies, and he'd read my Ergonomics thesis
on applying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings,
and liked what I had to say there. But I think it came down to us
having a good time needling each other.</P>
<P>I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future
unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien
intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of
us. He'd tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator
that one's personal reservoir of introspection and
creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real
victory.</P>
<P>This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without
resolving. I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured
the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but
respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were
rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring
the thing that money really represented—your personal
capital with your friends and neighbors—you more
accurately gauged your success.</P>
<P>And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited
trail that led to my allowing that while, yes, we might someday
encounter alien species with wild and fabulous ways, that right now,
there was a slightly depressing homogeneity to the world.</P>
<P>On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans
and one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness
was present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting.
They all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for
Dan in the sweet, flower-stinking streets.</P>
<P>He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been
torturing with his war-stories said that they'd wrapped
up that morning, and he'd headed to the walled city of
Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of US
Marines who'd settled there and cut themselves off from
the Bitchun Society.</P>
<P>So I went to Disney World.</P>
<P>In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the
minuscule cabin reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be
frozen and stacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the
only one taking the trip in realtime, but a flight attendant
dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized orange juice and a rubbery,
pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out the windows at the infinite
clouds while the autopilot banked around the turbulence, and wondered
when I'd see Dan next.</P>
<DIV id="ch1" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 1</H1>
    <P>My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned
    enough that it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was
    second-generation Disney World, her parents being among the original
    ad-hocracy that took over the management of Liberty Square and Tom
    Sawyer Island. She was, quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World
    and it showed.</P>
    <P>It showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing,
    from her shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and
    cog in the animatronics that were in her charge. Her folks were in
    canopic jars in Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries.</P>
    <P>On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of the
    Liberty Belle's riverboat pier, watching the listless
    Confederate flag over Fort Langhorn on Tom Sawyer Island by
    moonlight. The Magic Kingdom was all closed up and every last guest
    had been chased out the gate underneath the Main Street train
    station, and we were able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief, shuck
    parts of our costumes, and relax together while the cicadas sang.</P>
    <P>I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of
    magic in having my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by
    moonlight, hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the
    turnstiles, breathing the warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head
    against my shoulder and gave me a butterfly kiss under my jaw.</P>
    <P>“Her name was McGill,” I
    sang, gently.</P>
    <P>“But she called herself Lil,” she sang, warm breath on my collarbones.</P>
    <P>“And everyone knew her as Nancy,” I sang.</P>
    <P>I'd been startled to know that she knew the Beatles.
    They'd been old news in my youth, after all. But her
    parents had given her a thorough—if
    eclectic—education.</P>
    <P>“Want to do a walk-through?” she asked. It was one of her favorite duties, exploring every
    inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, after the horde of
    tourists had gone. We both liked to see the underpinnings of the
    magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at the relationship.</P>
    <P>“I'm a little pooped. Let's
    sit a while longer, if you don't mind.”</P>
    <P>She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, all right. Old
    man.” She reached up and gently
    tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I think the
    age difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting
    it get to me. 
    </P>
    <P>“I think I'll be able to manage a totter
    through the Haunted Mansion, if you just give me a moment to rest my
    bursitis.” I felt her smile against
    my shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom
    ghosts and dance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to
    try and stare down the marble busts in the library that followed
    your gaze as you passed.</P>
    <P>I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her,
    watching the water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go
    when I heard a soft <EM>ping</EM> inside my cochlea. “Damn,” I said. “I've got a call.”</P>
    <P>“Tell them you're busy,” she said.</P>
    <P>“I will,” I said, and
    answered the call subvocally. “Julius here.”</P>
    <P>“Hi, Julius. It's Dan. You got a
    minute?”</P>
    <P>I knew a thousand Dans, but I recognized the voice immediately,
    though it'd been ten years since we last got drunk at
    the Gazoo together. I muted the subvocal and said, “Lil,
    I've got to take this. Do you mind?”</P>
    <P>“Oh, <EM>no</EM>, not at all,” she sarcased at me. She sat up and pulled out her crack pipe
    and lit up.</P>
    <P>“Dan,” I
    subvocalized, “long time no speak.”</P>
    <P>“Yeah, buddy, it sure has been,” he said, and his voice cracked on a sob.</P>
    <P>I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How
    can I help?” she said, softly but
    swiftly. I waved her off and switched the phone to full-vocal mode.
    My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the cricket-punctuated calm.</P>
    <P>“Where you at, Dan?” I
    asked.</P>
    <P>“Down here, in Orlando. I'm stuck out on
    Pleasure Island.”</P>
    <P>“All right,” I said.
    “Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer's Club,
    upstairs on the couch by the door. I'll be there
    in—” I shot a look at
    Lil, who knew the castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed
    ten fingers at me. “Ten minutes.”</P>
    <P>“Okay,” he said.
    “Sorry.” He had his
    voice back under control. I switched off.</P>
    <P>“What's up?” Lil
    asked.</P>
    <P>“I'm not sure. An old friend is in town.
    He sounds like he's got a problem.”</P>
    <P>Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture.
    “There,” she said.
    “I've just dumped the best route to Pleasure
    Island to your public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?”</P>
    <P>I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents
    and booted down the stairs to the hum of the underground
    tunnel-system. I took the slidewalk to cast parking and zipped my
    little cart out to Pleasure Island.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of
    faked-up trophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs,
    castmembers were working the animatronic masks and idols, chattering
    with the guests.</P>
    <P>Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He
    had raccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I
    approached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it had
    dropped to nearly zero.</P>
    <P>“Jesus,” I said, as I
    sat down next to him. “You look like hell, Dan.”</P>
    <P>He nodded. “Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “But in this case, they're
    bang-on.”</P>
    <P>“You want to talk about it?” I asked.</P>
    <P>“Somewhere else, huh? I hear they ring in the New Year
    every night at midnight; I think that'd be a little too
    much for me right now.”</P>
    <P>I led him out to my cart and cruised back to the place I shared
    with Lil, out in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty
    minute ride, hammering one after another into his mouth, filling my
    runabout with stinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in the
    rear-view. He had his eyes closed, and in repose he looked dead. I
    could hardly believe that this was my vibrant action-hero pal of
    yore.</P>
    <P>Surreptitiously, I called Lil's phone. “I'm
    bringing him home,” I subvocalized.
    “He's in rough shape. Not sure what it's
    all about.”</P>
    <P>“I'll make up the couch,” she said. “And get some coffee together. Love
    you.”</P>
    <P>“Back atcha, kid,” I
    said.</P>
    <P>As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he
    opened his eyes. “You're a pal, Jules.” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried to think of
    who I could call, and you were the only one. I've missed
    you, bud.”</P>
    <P>“Lil said she'd put some coffee on,” I said. “You sound like you need it.”</P>
    <P>Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow
    on the side table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs
    beside them. She stood and extended her hand. “I'm
    Lil,” she said.</P>
    <P>“Dan,” he said.
    “It's a pleasure.”</P>
    <P>I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of
    surprised disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that
    it's important; but to the kids, it's the
    <EM>world</EM>. Someone without any is automatically suspect. I
    watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her
    hand on her jeans. “Coffee?” she said.</P>
    <P>“Oh, yeah,” Dan said,
    and slumped on the sofa.</P>
    <P>She poured him a cup and set it on a coaster on the coffee table.
    “I'll let you boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the bedroom.</P>
    <P>“No,” Dan said.
    “Wait. If you don't mind. I think it'd
    help if I could talk to someone… younger,
    too.”</P>
    <P>She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the
    second-gen castmembers have at their instant disposal and settled
    into an armchair. She pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went
    through my crack period before she was born, just after they made it
    decaf, and I always felt old when I saw her and her friends light
    up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her and taking the
    pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back.</P>
    <P>Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them,
    sipped his coffee. It was clear he was trying to figure out where to
    start.</P>
    <P>“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is
    what it boils down to,” he said.</P>
    <P>“Who doesn't?” I
    said.</P>
    <P>“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday
    I'd run out of things to do, things to see. I knew that
    I'd finish some day. You remember, we used to argue
    about it. I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end
    of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place left
    on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There
    isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.”</P>
    <P>“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.”</P>
    <P>“No!” he shouted,
    startling both of us. “I'm <EM>done</EM>.
    It's <EM>over</EM>.”</P>
    <P>“So do it,” Lil said.</P>
    <P>“I <EM>can't</EM>,” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He cried like a
    baby, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole body. Lil went
    into the kitchen and got some tissue, and passed it to me. I sat
    alongside him and awkwardly patted his back.</P>
    <P>“Jesus,” he said,
    into his palms. “Jesus.”</P>
    <P>“Dan?” I said,
    quietly.</P>
    <P>He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands.
    “Thanks,” he said.
    “I've tried to make a go of it, really I
    have. I've spent the last eight years in Istanbul,
    writing papers on my missions, about the communities. I did some
    followup studies, interviews. No one was interested. Not even me. I
    smoked a lot of hash. It didn't help. So, one morning I
    woke up and went to the bazaar and said good bye to the friends
    I'd made there. Then I went to a pharmacy and had the
    man make me up a lethal injection. He wished me good luck and I went
    back to my rooms. I sat there with the hypo all afternoon, then I
    decided to sleep on it, and I got up the next morning and did it all
    over again. I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn't
    have the guts. I just didn't have the guts. I've
    stared down the barrels of a hundred guns, had a thousand knives
    pressed up against my throat, but I didn't have the guts
    to press that button.”</P>
    <P>“You were too late,” Lil
    said.</P>
    <P>We both turned to look at her.</P>
    <P>“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You're
    pathetic. If you killed yourself right now, you'd just
    be a washed-up loser who couldn't hack it. If you'd
    done it ten years earlier, you would've been going out
    on top—a champion, retiring permanently.” She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk.</P>
    <P>Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes,
    it's like she's on a different planet. All I
    could do was sit there, horrified, and she was happy to discuss the
    timing of my pal's suicide.</P>
    <P>But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it,
    too.</P>
    <P>“A day late and a dollar short,” he sighed.</P>
    <P>“Well, don't just sit there,” she said. “You know what you've got to
    do.”</P>
    <P>“What?” I said,
    involuntarily irritated by her tone.</P>
    <P>She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He's
    got to get back on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive
    work. Get that Whuffie up, too. <EM>Then</EM> he can kill himself
    with dignity.”</P>
    <P>It was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Dan,
    though, was cocking an eyebrow at her and thinking hard. “How
    old did you say you were?” he
    asked.</P>
    <P>“Twenty-three,” she
    said.</P>
    <P>“Wish I'd had your smarts at
    twenty-three,” he said, and heaved
    a sigh, straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get
    the job done?”</P>
    <P>I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then
    nodded.</P>
    <P>“Sure, pal, sure,” I
    said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look beat.”</P>
    <P>“Beat doesn't begin to cover it,” he said.</P>
    <P>“Good night, then,” I
    said.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch2" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 2</H1>
    <P>Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil's folks
    had taken over the running of Liberty Square with a group of other
    interested, compatible souls. They did a fine job, racked up gobs of
    Whuffie, and anyone who came around and tried to take it over would
    be so reviled by the guests they wouldn't find a pot to
    piss in. Or they'd have such a wicked, radical approach
    that they'd ouster Lil's parents and their
    pals, and do a better job.</P>
    <P>It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the
    throne—a group who'd worked with the
    original ad-hocracy and then had moved off to other pursuits—some
    of them had gone to school, some of them had made movies, written
    books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing to help start things up. A
    few had deadheaded for a couple decades.</P>
    <P>They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update the
    attractions. The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest
    conservatives in the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing
    technology in the face of a Park that changed almost daily. The
    newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had
    their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of
    it.</P>
    <P>So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the
    meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents,
    the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion,
    arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of
    the old-time Disney Imagineers.</P>
    <P>I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering
    with Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of
    everything running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead
    bot for a backup in five minutes flat, which is all that
    crowd-control would permit.</P>
    <P>It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though
    I'd barely seen him in that time, his presence was vivid
    in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a new smell, not
    unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, something barely noticeable
    over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone
    rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of
    the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. His
    excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me
    into his over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being.</P>
    <P>“You just missed Dan,” she
    said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest, working with
    an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied back in a
    neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of
    girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a
    mattress somewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind
    affectionately, and she wriggled appreciatively. “He's
    looking better.”</P>
    <P>His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I
    remembered him. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the
    defeated stoop that had startled me when I saw him at the
    Adventurer's Club. “What did he want?”</P>
    <P>“He's been hanging out with Debra—he
    wanted to make sure I knew what she's up to.”</P>
    <P>Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's
    parents. She'd spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing,
    coding sim-rides. If she had her way, we'd tear down
    every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and replace them with
    pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos.</P>
    <P>The problem was that she was <EM>really good</EM> at coding sims.
    Her Great Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking—the
    Star Wars sequence had already inspired a hundred fan-sites that
    fielded millions of hits.</P>
    <P>She'd leveraged her success into a deal with the
    Adventureland ad-hocs to rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and
    their backstage areas were piled high with reference: treasure
    chests and cutlasses and bowsprits. It was terrifying to walk
    through; the Pirates was the last ride Walt personally supervised,
    and we'd thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had built
    a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century
    Chinese pirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Park from
    obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration would incorporate the best
    aspects of its Chinese cousin—the AI-driven sims that
    communicated with each other and with the guests, greeting them by
    name each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of
    piracy on the high seas; the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic
    necropolis of rotting junks on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch
    and yaw of the sim as it weathered a violent, breath-taking
    storm—but with Western themes: wafts of Jamaican pepper
    sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean accents; and
    swordfights conducted in the manner of the pirates who plied the
    blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack like
    cordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulky ride-apparatus
    and dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time.</P>
    <P>“So, what's she up to?”</P>
    <P>Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's
    mechanical guts and made a comical moue of worry. “She's
    rehabbing the Pirates—and doing an incredible job.
    They're ahead of schedule, they've got good
    net-buzz, the focus groups are cumming themselves.” The comedy went out of her expression, baring genuine worry.</P>
    <P>She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger
    at him. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for
    the soft hum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and
    his audiotrack kicked in low: “All the armies of Europe,
    Asia, and Africa <EM>combined</EM> could not, by force, make a track
    on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If destruction be
    our lot, then we ourselves must be its author—and its
    finisher.” She mimed turning down
    the gain and he fell silent again.</P>
    <P>“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at him again, powering him
    down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat, then
    carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket.</P>
    <P>I put my arm around her shoulders. “You're
    doing all you can—and it's good work,” I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode
    of speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a
    flush of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and
    fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I
    gave her a final squeeze and let her go.</P>
    <P>She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It'll
    be fine, of course,” she said. “I
    mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will do her job
    very, very well, and make things even better than they are now.
    That's not so bad.”</P>
    <P>This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the
    last time we'd talked, but you don't live
    more than a century without learning when to point out that sort of
    thing and when not to.</P>
    <P>My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly
    backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his
    niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink
    terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband
    communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and
    I answered it.</P>
    <P>“Yes,” I
    subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a
    backup—one of my enduring fears was that I'd
    forget the backup altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an
    entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost the knack
    of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to
    machine-generated reminders over conscious choice.</P>
    <P>“It's Dan.” I
    heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him—children's
    laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of
    thousands of feet. “Can you meet me at the Tiki Room?
    It's pretty important.”</P>
    <P>“Can it wait for fifteen?” I
    asked.</P>
    <P>“Sure—see you in fifteen.”</P>
    <P>I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a
    HUD, dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then
    it finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in
    my head and my life flashed before my eyes.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch3" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 3</H1>
    <P>The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from
    backup—in the era of the cure for death, people live
    pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a
    year.</P>
    <P>Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won't
    participate in it. Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra
    on that subject just, you know, <EM>died</EM>, a generation before.
    The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its
    detractors, just outlive them.</P>
    <P>The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth
    birthday. I was SCUBA diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of
    course, I don't remember the incident, but knowing my
    habits at that particular dive-site and having read the dive-logs of
    my SCUBA-buddies, I've reconstructed the events.</P>
    <P>I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed
    bottle and mask. I'd also borrowed a wetsuit, but I
    wasn't wearing it—the blood-temp salt water
    was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between it and my skin. The
    caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiled and twisted like
    intestines. Through each hole and around each corner, there was a
    hollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters
    skittered over the walls and through the holes. Schools of fish as
    bright as jewels darted and executed breath-taking precision
    maneuvers as I disturbed their busy days. I do some of my best
    thinking under water, and I'm often slipping off into
    dangerous reverie at depth. Normally, my diving buddies ensure that
    I don't hurt myself, but this time I got away from them,
    spidering forward into a tiny hole.</P>
    <P>Where I got stuck.</P>
    <P>My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with
    the hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. My
    buddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my
    bottle and buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others
    exchanged hand signals, silently debating the best way to get me
    loose. Suddenly, I was thrashing and kicking, and then I disappeared
    into the cave, minus my vest and bottle. I'd apparently
    attempted to cut through my vest's straps and managed to
    sever the tube of my regulator. After inhaling a jolt of sea water,
    I'd thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a
    monstrous patch of spindly fire-coral. I'd inhaled
    another lungful of water and kicked madly for a tiny hole in the
    cave's ceiling, whence my buddies retrieved me shortly
    thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy red welts from the
    stinging coral.</P>
    <P>In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the
    procedure took most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special
    clinic. Luckily, I'd had one made just before I left for
    Cuba, a few weeks earlier. My next-most-recent backup was three
    years old, dating from the completion of my second symphony.</P>
    <P>They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone at
    Toronto General. As far as I knew, I'd laid down in the
    backup clinic one moment and arisen the next. It took most of a year
    to get over the feeling that the whole world was putting a monstrous
    joke over on me, that the drowned corpse I'd seen was
    indeed my own. In my mind, the rebirth was figurative as well as
    literal—the missing time was enough that I found myself
    hard-pressed to socialize with my pre-death friends. 
    </P>
    <P>I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he
    immediately pounced on the fact that I'd gone to Disney
    World to spend a week sorting out my feelings, reinventing myself,
    moving to space, marrying a crazy lady. He found it very curious
    that I always rebooted myself at Disney World. When I told him that
    I was going to live there someday, he asked me if that would mean
    that I was done reinventing myself. Sometimes, as I ran my fingers
    through Lil's sweet red curls, I thought of that remark
    and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled that my friend
    Dan had been so prescient.</P>
    <P>The next time I died, they'd improved the technology
    somewhat. I'd had a massive stroke in my seventy-third
    year, collapsing on the ice in the middle of a house-league hockey
    game. By the time they cut my helmet away, the hematomae had crushed
    my brain into a pulpy, blood-sotted mess. I'd been lax
    in backing up, and I lost most of a year. But they woke me gently,
    with a computer-generated precis of the events of the missing
    interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I felt
    at home again in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found
    myself in Disney World, methodically flensing away the relationships
    I'd built and starting afresh in Boston, living on the
    ocean floor and working the heavy-metal harvesters, a project that
    led, eventually, to my Chem thesis at U of T.</P>
    <P>After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to
    appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening
    ten years. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that
    led up to my third death as seen from various third-party POVs:
    security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized
    memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a
    computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling
    preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way
    because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been
    put in place when I was restored.</P>
    <P>Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling
    face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She
    took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently
    at me and I was seized with a warm, comforting feeling of being
    surrounded by people who really loved me. I dug for words
    appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened my mouth and
    said, to my surprise, “I have to pee.”</P>
    <P>Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed,
    naked, and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully
    limber, with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned
    over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the
    floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and
    buttocks. A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that
    had crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that
    my nose and earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar
    crow's-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrows were
    gone. I had a day's beard all over—head,
    face, pubis, arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at
    the ticklish newness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate
    all over, just to keep this feeling of newness forever, but the
    neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a sense of urgency
    over my murder was creeping up on me.</P>
    <P>I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the
    bedroom. The smells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were
    bright in my nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I
    came into the room and helped me to the bed. “Well, this
    <EM>sucks</EM>,” I said.</P>
    <P>I'd gone straight from the uplink through the
    utilidors—three quick cuts of security cam footage, one
    at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the exit in the
    underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused
    and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my
    way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that
    I'd developed when I was doing field-work on my
    crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd
    toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of
    shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass.</P>
    <P>Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer
    to him, passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows
    and knees, wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls
    covered with Epcot Center logomarks. One of them is wearing a pith
    helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise.
    Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki Room's
    entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back, just
    as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organic
    pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm.
    Casually, grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol,
    exactly like Lil does with her finger when she's
    uploading, and the pistol lunges forward. Dan's gaze
    flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungs bursting
    out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle
    and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag,
    now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink.
    When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl
    with the pistol is long gone.</P>
    <P>The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and
    the girl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter
    yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the
    girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of
    her friends. Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms
    and fires her pistol. The self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body
    chemistry, flies low, near ground level, weaving between the feet of
    the crowd, moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me,
    it screams upwards and into my spine, detonating once it's
    entered my chest cavity.</P>
    <P>The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the
    Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up,
    following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking
    and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping
    Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in
    Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears
    again.</P>
    <P>“Has anyone ID'd the girl?” I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events.
    The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched
    for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.</P>
    <P>Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with
    had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven
    Sisters—Hope.” The
    Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every
    second teenage girl wore one of them.</P>
    <P>“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of the pith
    helmet purchase?”</P>
    <P>Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back
    for six months: only three matched the girl's apparent
    age; all three have alibis. Chances are she stole it.”</P>
    <P>“Why?” I asked,
    finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out
    of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like
    shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk
    as she pulled the trigger on me.</P>
    <P>“It wasn't random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed to
    you—that means that she'd gotten close to
    you at some point.”</P>
    <P>Right—which meant that she'd been to
    Disney World in the last ten years. That narrowed it down, all
    right.</P>
    <P>“What happened to her after Tomorrowland?” I said.</P>
    <P>“We don't know,” Lil said. “Something wrong with the cameras. We
    lost her and she never reappeared.” She
    sounded hot and angry—she took equipment failures in the
    Magic Kingdom personally.</P>
    <P>“Who'd want to do this?” I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was the first
    time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to
    be a drama-queen about it.</P>
    <P>Dan's eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes,
    people do things for reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them,
    that the rest of the world couldn't hope to understand.
    I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made
    sense afterwards.” He stroked his
    chin. “Sometimes, it's better to look for
    temperament, rather than motivation: who <EM>could</EM> do something
    like this?”</P>
    <P>Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths
    who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That
    narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the
    time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming
    up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a
    couple of those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it
    helped to take a reality check while I was churning away in the
    rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations.</P>
    <P>I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.</P>
    <P>“<EM>What</EM> are you doing?” Lil asked, alarmed.</P>
    <P>“I've got a shift. I'm running
    late.”</P>
    <P>“You're in no shape to work,” Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of her.</P>
    <P>“I'm fine—good as new.” I barked a humorless laugh. “I'm not
    going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more.”</P>
    <P><EM>Those bastards</EM>? I thought—when had I decided
    that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no
    way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed
    too precisely, too thoroughly.</P>
    <P>Dan moved to block the bedroom door. “Wait a
    second,” he said. “You
    need rest.”</P>
    <P>I fixed him with a doleful glare. “I'll
    decide that,” I said. He stepped
    aside.</P>
    <P>“I'll tag along, then,” he said. “Just in case.”</P>
    <P>I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles—sympathy
    Whuffie—but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating
    disapproval. Screw 'em.</P>
    <P>I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door
    as I put it in gear and sped out. 
    </P>
    <P>“Are you sure you're all right?” Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabout taking the corner at
    the end of our cul-de-sac. 
    </P>
    <P>“Why wouldn't I be?” I said. “I'm as good as new.”</P>
    <P>“Funny choice of words,” he
    said. “Some would say that you <EM>were</EM> new.”</P>
    <P>I groaned. “Not this argument again,” I said. “I feel like me and no one else is making
    that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a
    backup?”</P>
    <P>“All I'm saying is, there's a
    difference between <EM>you</EM> and an exact copy of you, isn't
    there?”</P>
    <P>I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old
    fights, but I couldn't resist the bait, and as I
    marshalled my arguments, it actually helped calm me down some. Dan
    was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew
    yourself. “So you're saying that if you were
    obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that you wouldn't
    be you anymore?”</P>
    <P>“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and
    recreated is different from not being destroyed at all, right?”</P>
    <P>“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're
    being destroyed and recreated a trillion times a second.”</P>
    <P>“On a very, very small level—”</P>
    <P>“What difference does that make?”</P>
    <P>“Fine, I'll concede that. But you're
    not really an atom-for-atom copy. You're a clone, with a
    copied <EM>brain</EM>—that's not the same as
    quantum destruction.”</P>
    <P>“Very nice thing to say to someone who's
    just been murdered, pal. You got a problem with clones?”</P>
    <P>And we were off and running.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and
    solicitous. Each of them made a point of coming around and touching
    the stiff, starched shoulder of my butler's costume,
    letting me know that if there was anything they could do for me… I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests,
    how they waited, when they arrived, how they dispersed through the
    exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute,
    twenty-two second ride-through, running interference for me with the
    other castmembers.</P>
    <P>He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and
    we walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents,
    noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different
    about the queue-area. Dan groaned. “They did it
    already,” he said.</P>
    <P>I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board:
    Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel.
    “Excuse our mess!” the
    sign declared. “We're renovating to serve you
    better!”</P>
    <P>I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the
    sign, a self-satisfied smile on his face. He'd started
    off life as a squat, northern Chinese, but had had his bones
    lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost elfin.
    I took one look at his smile and understood—Debra had
    established a toehold in Liberty Square.</P>
    <P>“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering
    committee an hour after you got shot. The committee loved the plans;
    so did the net. They're promising not to touch the
    Mansion.”</P>
    <P>“You didn't mention this,” I said, hotly.</P>
    <P>“We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The
    timing was bad, but there's no indication that they
    arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an alibi;
    furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups
    for proof.”</P>
    <P>“Right,” I said.
    “Right. So they just <EM>happened</EM> to have plans for
    a new Hall standing by. And they just <EM>happened</EM> to file them
    after I got shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me.
    It's all a big coincidence.”</P>
    <P>Dan shook his head. “We're not stupid,
    Jules. No one thinks that it's a coincidence. Debra's
    the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standing by, just in
    case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not a
    murderer.”</P>
    <P>I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that
    I sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head
    down. Defeat seeped through me, saturating me.</P>
    <P>Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was
    grinning wryly. “Posit,” he
    said, “for the moment, that Debra really did do this
    thing, set you up so that she could take over.”</P>
    <P>I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the
    thing he would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks
    back in the old days. “All right, I've
    posited it.”</P>
    <P>“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or
    one of the real old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents
    instead of Tom Sawyer Island or even the Mansion; and three, follow
    it up with such a blatant, suspicious move?”</P>
    <P>“All right,” I said,
    warming to the challenge. “One: I'm important
    enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full
    investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't
    rehab it without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's
    coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't
    real important.”</P>
    <P>“Sure,” Dan said,
    “sure.” Then he launched
    an answering salvo, and while I was thinking up my answer, he helped
    me to my feet and walked me out to my runabout, arguing all the way,
    so that by the time I noticed we weren't at the Park
    anymore, I was home and in bed.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the
    duration, Lil had more time on her hands than she knew what to do
    with. She hung around the little bungalow, the two of us in the
    living room, staring blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in
    the claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my working notes
    on queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly.
    Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made
    suggestions based on her long experience.</P>
    <P>It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput
    without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could
    shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty
    guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the
    more guests who got to experience the Mansion, the more of a
    Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a
    move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three
    seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the
    Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic
    window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the
    guests to all the scenes more quickly.</P>
    <P>I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after
    closing and invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and
    test it out.</P>
    <P>It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The
    ad-hocs had enough friends and family with them that we were able to
    simulate an off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the
    preshow area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the
    wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers.</P>
    <P>The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's
    uniform, her eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly
    pallor. She gave us a cold, considering glare, then intoned,
    “Master Gracey requests more bodies.”</P>
    <P>As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil
    contrived to give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return
    the favor, and saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over
    Lil's shoulder. My smile died on my lips.</P>
    <P>The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in
    there—some admixture of cruelty and worry that I
    didn't know what to make of. He looked away immediately.
    I'd known that Debra would have spies in the crowd, of
    course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this the best
    show I knew how.</P>
    <P>It's subtle, this business of making the show better
    from within. Lil had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to
    stretch-room number two, the most recently serviced one. Once the
    crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my
    body language to poses of subtle attention directed at the new
    spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind
    the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room, I
    leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image.
    And an instant before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast
    my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that others had taken my
    cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit corpse dropped from the
    pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at its neck.</P>
    <P>The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded
    the Doom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as
    we made our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy
    and an instant later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf.</P>
    <P>He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed
    his sidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating
    chandelier and into the corridor where the portraits'
    eyes watched us. Two years before, I'd accelerated this
    sequence and added some random swivel to the Doom Buggies, shaving
    25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly throughput cap from 2365
    to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the other
    seconds I'd shaved away since. The violent pitching of
    the Buggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one
    another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety
    bar, I felt that it was cold and sweaty.</P>
    <P>He was nervous! <EM>He</EM> was nervous. What did <EM>he</EM>
    have to be nervous about? I was the one who'd been
    murdered—maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to
    finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see
    suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's
    pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy
    behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular
    castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: “Get
    ready to jump out on my signal.” Anyone
    leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the
    ride system. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot of
    explaining, which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra's
    crony.</P>
    <P>We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of
    doors, where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining
    against the hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I
    thought about it—if I wanted to kill someone on the
    Mansion, what would be the best place to do it? The attic
    staircase-- the next sequence—seemed like a good bet. A
    cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of
    the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward
    the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I
    were staring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous as it was.
    I swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.</P>
    <P>He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on
    staring at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We
    rode down the staircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of
    voices from the cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I
    caught sight of the quaking groundkeeper animatronic from the corner
    of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched
    forward as the ride system shuddered to a stop.</P>
    <P>“Jules?” came Dan's
    voice in my cochlea. “You all right?”</P>
    <P>He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had
    leapt clear of the Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at
    me with a mixture of surprise and pity.</P>
    <P>“It's all right, it's all
    right. False alarm.” I paged Lil
    and subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it
    was all right.</P>
    <P>I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my
    eyes fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the
    timer I'd been running. The demo was a debacle—instead
    of shaving off three seconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted
    to cry.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue,
    leaning heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet
    cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I
    was spooked.</P>
    <P>And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered,
    but what had it cost me? A few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted my backup into my new body, a merciful
    gap in memory from my departure at the backup terminal up until my
    death. I wasn't one of those nuts who took death
    <EM>seriously</EM>. It wasn't like they'd
    done something <EM>permanent</EM>. 
    </P>
    <P>In the meantime, I <EM>had</EM> done something permanent: I'd
    dug Lil's grave a little deeper, endangered the
    ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion. I'd acted
    like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger, and
    swallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea.</P>
    <P>I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to
    ask me what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found
    myself facing the elf.</P>
    <P>He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone
    running a language module. “Hi there. We haven't
    been introduced, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your
    work. I'm Tim Fung.”</P>
    <P>I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy
    in the close heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at how much like a bark it sounded. <EM>Careful</EM>,
    I thought, <EM>no need to escalate the hostilities.</EM> “It's
    kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with the
    Pirates.”</P>
    <P>He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd
    just been given high praise from one of his heroes. “Really?
    I think it's pretty good—the second time
    around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarify the
    vision. Beijing—well, it was exciting, but it was
    rushed, you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day,
    there was another pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park
    down. Debra used to send me out to give the children piggyback
    rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was evicting the
    squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine the
    designs, revisit them without the floor show.”</P>
    <P>I knew about this, of course—Beijing had been a real
    struggle for the ad-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed,
    many times over. Debra herself had been killed every day for a week
    and restored to a series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the
    ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra
    had a reputation for pursuing expedience.</P>
    <P>“I'm starting to find out how it feels to
    work under pressure,” I said, and
    nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look
    embarrassed, then horrified.</P>
    <P>“We would <EM>never</EM> touch the Mansion,” he said. “It's <EM>perfect</EM>!”</P>
    <P>Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both
    looked concerned—now that I thought of it, they'd
    both seemed incredibly concerned about me since the day I was
    revived.</P>
    <P>Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on
    Lil for support. They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of
    jealousy jetted through me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took
    Lil's big, scarred hand in mine as soon as she was in
    reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She had changed out of
    her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose
    micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration.</P>
    <P>“Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just
    telling me war stories from the Pirates project in Beijing.”</P>
    <P>Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. “That was
    some hard work,” Dan said.</P>
    <P>It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was
    normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was
    still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed
    Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my
    opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that
    his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the
    rankings of people I respected, was also high—higher
    than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect
    from the elf—<EM>Tim</EM>, I had to remember to call him
    Tim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp that
    mattered.</P>
    <P>Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still
    had a rotten profile. He had accrued a good deal of left-handed
    Whuffie, and I curiously backtraced it to the occasion of my murder,
    when Debra's people had accorded him a generous dollop
    of props for the levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and
    moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance in front of their
    wondrous Pirates.</P>
    <P>I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie
    that got me killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it
    with a start, realizing that the other three were politely ignoring
    my blown buffer. I could have run backwards through my short-term
    memory to get the gist of the conversation, but that would have
    lengthened the pause. Screw it. “So, how're
    things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?” I asked Tim.</P>
    <P>Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall
    to Debra's ad-hocs, that being the only way to avoid the
    appearance of childish disattention to the almighty Whuffie. Now she
    had to keep up the fiction of good-natured cooperation—that
    meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for excuses to pounce on
    her work.</P>
    <P>Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with.
    On his smooth, pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute.
    “We're doing good stuff, I think. Debra's
    had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she
    went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with
    broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents'
    lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies,
    personal papers. It'll be like having each President
    <EM>inside</EM> you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said
    we're going to <EM>flash-bake</EM> the Presidents on
    your mind!” His eyes glittered in
    the twilight.</P>
    <P>Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking,
    Tim's description struck a chord in me. My personality
    seemed to be rattling around a little in my mind, as though it had
    been improperly fitted. It made the idea of having the gestalt of
    50-some Presidents squashed in along with it perversely appealing.</P>
    <P>“Wow,” I said.
    “That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical
    plant?” The Hall as it stood had a
    quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings
    of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the
    stars-and-bars.</P>
    <P>“That's not really my area,” Tim said. “I'm a programmer. But I
    could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you
    want.”</P>
    <P>“That would be fine,” Lil
    said, taking my elbow. “I think we should be heading
    home, now, though.” She began to
    tug me away. Dan took my other elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle
    glowed like a ghostly wedding cake in the twilight.</P>
    <P>“That's too bad,” Tim said. “My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on
    the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have
    you drop by.”</P>
    <P>The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the
    enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. “That
    would be <EM>great</EM>!” I said,
    too loudly. My head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands
    fell away.</P>
    <P>“But we've got an early morning
    tomorrow,” Lil said. “You've
    got a shift at eight, and I'm running into town for
    groceries.” She was lying, but she
    was telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart
    move. But my faith was unshakeable.</P>
    <P>“Eight a.m. shift? No problem—I'll
    be right here when it starts. I'll just grab a shower at
    the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorail back in time
    to change. All right?”</P>
    <P>Dan tried. “But Jules, we were going to grab some
    dinner at Cinderella's Royal Table, remember? I made
    reservations.”</P>
    <P>“Aw, we can eat any time,” I
    said. “This is a hell of an opportunity.”</P>
    <P>“It sure is,” Dan
    said, giving up. “Mind if I come along?”</P>
    <P>He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, <EM>If
    he's going to be a nut, one of us really should stay
    with him</EM>. I was past caring—I was going to beard
    the lion in his den!</P>
    <P>Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then
    it's settled! Let's go.”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept
    sending him straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter
    of small-talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up for my
    debacle in the Mansion with Tim, win him over.</P>
    <P>Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs
    onstage, the animatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the
    wings. Debra was sprawled in Lincoln's armchair, her
    head cocked lazily, her legs extended before her. The Hall's
    normal smells of ozone and cleanliness were overridden by sweat and
    machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall
    took fifteen years to research and execute, and a couple of days to
    tear down.</P>
    <P>She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been
    born with, albeit one that had been regenerated dozens of times
    after her deaths. It was patrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was
    made for staring down. She was at least as old as I was, though she
    was only apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this age
    because it was one that afforded boundless reserves of energy.</P>
    <P>She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did
    nod languorously at me. The other ad-hocs had been split into little
    clusters, hunched over terminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed,
    sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who managed to look
    lazy and excited simultaneously.</P>
    <P><EM>Did you have me killed</EM>? I wondered, staring at Debra.
    After all, she'd been killed dozens, if not hundreds of
    times. It might not be such a big deal for her.</P>
    <P>“Hi there,” I said,
    brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! You know Dan,
    right?”</P>
    <P>Debra nodded at him. “Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals,
    right?”</P>
    <P>Dan's poker face didn't twitch a muscle.
    “Hello, Debra,” he said.
    He'd been hanging out with them since Lil had briefed
    him on the peril to the Mansion, trying to gather some intelligence
    for us to use. They knew what he was up to, of course, but Dan was a
    fairly charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they tolerated
    him. But it seemed like he'd violated a boundary by
    accompanying me, as though the polite fiction that he was more a
    part of Debra's ad-hoc than Lil's was
    shattered by my presence.</P>
    <P>Tim said, “Can I show them the demo, Debra?”</P>
    <P>Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, “Sure, why not.
    You'll like this, guys.”</P>
    <P>Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the
    animatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn
    loose, packed up, stacked. They hadn't wasted a
    moment—they'd spent a week tearing down a
    show that had run for more than a century. The scrim that the
    projected portions of the show normally screened on was ground into
    the floor, spotted with grime, footprints and oil.</P>
    <P>Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing
    was off, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves
    lay strewn about it. It had the look of a prototype.</P>
    <P>“This is it—our uplink. So far, we've
    got a demo app running on it: Lincoln's old speech,
    along with the civil-war montage. Just switch on guest access and
    I'll core-dump it to you. It's wild.”</P>
    <P>I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access. Tim pointed a
    finger at the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of
    Lincoln: every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched
    movement tics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like
    I <EM>was</EM> Lincoln, for a moment, and then it passed. But I
    could still taste the lingering coppery flavor of cannon-fire and
    chewing tobacco.</P>
    <P>I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked
    sense-impressions, rich and detailed. I knew on the spot that
    Debra's Hall of the Presidents was going to be a hit.</P>
    <P>Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his
    expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked
    expectantly at me.</P>
    <P>“That's really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.”</P>
    <P>Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt
    programming—it's my specialty.”</P>
    <P>Debra spoke up from behind him—she'd
    sauntered over while Dan was getting his jolt. “I got the
    idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There's
    something wonderful about having memories implanted, like you're
    really working your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it
    all.”</P>
    <P>Tim sniffed. “Not synthetic at all,” he said, turning to me. “It's nice and
    soft, right?”</P>
    <P>I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when
    Debra said: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more
    impressionistic, less computer-y. He's wrong, of course.
    We don't want to simulate the experience of watching the
    show—we want to <EM>transcend it</EM>.”</P>
    <P>Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the
    way we do that is by making the experience <EM>human</EM>, a mile in
    the presidents' shoes. Empathy-driven. What's
    the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone's
    brain?”</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch4" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 4</H1>
    <P>One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:</P>
    <OL>
        <LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in">That Debra's people
        had had me killed, and screw their alibis, 
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in">That they would kill me again,
        when the time came for them to make a play for the Haunted Mansion,
                </P>
        </LI><LI><P>That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive
        strike against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt. 
        </P>
    </LI></OL>
    <P>Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision
    in the Hall of Presidents, Debra's people working with
    effortless cooperation born of the adversity they'd
    faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team, making suggestions
    with body language as much as with words, leaving bursts of inspired
    activity in her wake.</P>
    <P>It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc
    this tight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda.
    Ad-hoc? Hell, call them what they were: an army.</P>
    <P>Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim
    finished at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation
    with Debra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the
    second time around, as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on
    your consciousness. The Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly
    nods that snuck into your experience on each successive ride.</P>
    <P>Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained
    pride as I switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public
    directory, and, gingerly, I executed it.</P>
    <P>God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and
    mules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it
    crashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass
    through, there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but this,
    this was gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball,
    filling me and spilling over. It was panicky for a moment, as the
    essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten my own personality, and,
    just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a
    rush of endorphin and adrenaline that made me want to jump.</P>
    <P>“Tim,” I gasped.
    “Tim! That was…” Words failed me. I wanted to hug him. What we could do for
    the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directly imprinting the
    experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes; the thick,
    deaf ears.</P>
    <P>Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne.
    “You liked it?” Tim
    said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seat where Dan
    slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat.</P>
    <P>Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it
    came ire. How dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and
    expense that had given us the Disney rides—rides that
    had entertained the world for two centuries and more—could
    never compete head to head with what they were working on.</P>
    <P>My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn't
    they do this somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything
    I loved to realize this? They could build this tech anywhere—they
    could distribute it online and people could access it from their
    living rooms!</P>
    <P>But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old
    Whuffie—they'd make over Disney World and
    hold it, a single ad-hoc where three hundred had flourished before,
    smoothly operating a park twice the size of Manhattan.</P>
    <P>I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square
    and the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a
    damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my
    throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and
    solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a monument to the
    Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it.</P>
    <P>I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He
    grunted unintelligibly in my cochlea.</P>
    <P>“They did it—they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. It made what I had to do
    next easier.</P>
    <P>“Oh, Jesus. They didn't kill you—they
    offered their backups, remember? They couldn't have done
    it.”</P>
    <P>“Bullshit!” I shouted
    into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it, and they
    fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's
    all too neat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with
    the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a
    disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think they just had
    these plans lying around and moved on them when they could.”</P>
    <P>Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been
    stretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance
    crews scurrying in the night. “I do believe that.
    Clearly, you don't. It's not the first time
    we've disagreed. So now what?”</P>
    <P>“Now we save the Mansion,” I
    said. “Now we fight back.”</P>
    <P>“Oh, shit,” Dan said.</P>
    <P>I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs
    were showboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to
    the other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah,
    letting the key influencers in the Park in long before the bugs were
    hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind of impressed
    reaction that guaranteed continued support while they finished up; a
    failed demo could doom them. There were plenty of people in the Park
    who had a sentimental attachment to the Hall of Presidents, and
    whatever Debra's people came up with would have to
    answer their longing.</P>
    <P>“I'm going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted the runabout from home to the
    castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to gauge his reaction. He
    had his poker face on.</P>
    <P>“I'm not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It's better that she
    doesn't know—plausible deniability.”</P>
    <P>“And me?” he said.
    “Don't I need plausible deniability?”</P>
    <P>“No,” I said. “No,
    you don't. You're an outsider. You can make
    the case that you were working on your own—gone
    rogue.” I knew it wasn't
    fair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated
    in my dirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I
    knew it wasn't fair, but I didn't care. I
    knew that we were fighting for our own survival. “It's
    good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a
    post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each
    mediate them through our own experience. We're
    physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses.
    What Debra's people are building—it's
    hive-mind shit. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's
    not an experience, it's brainwashing! You gotta know
    that.” I was pleading, arguing with
    myself as much as with him.</P>
    <P>I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney
    back-roads, lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple
    signage. Dan was looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old
    days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking
    about it—I'd gotten through to him.</P>
    <P>“Jules, this isn't one of your better
    ideas.” My chest tightened, and he
    patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even
    when he was telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if
    Debra was behind your assassination—and that's
    not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that's the
    case, we've got better means at our disposal. Improving
    the Mansion, competing with her head to head, that's
    smart. Give it a little while and we can come back at her, take over
    the Hall—even the Pirates, that'd really
    piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she was behind the
    assassination, we can chase her off right now. Sabotage is not going
    to do you any good. You've got lots of other options.”</P>
    <P>“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them
    are emotionally satisfying. This way has some goddamn <EM>balls</EM>.”</P>
    <P>We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot
    and stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger
    cock. I heard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he
    was following behind.</P>
    <P>We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras,
    knowing that my image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd
    picked the timing of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I
    was sticking to my traditional pattern for watching hot-weather
    crowd dynamics. I'd made a point of visiting twice
    during the previous week at this time, and of dawdling in the
    commissary before heading topside. The delay between my arrival in
    the runabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not be
    discrepant.</P>
    <P>Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then
    hugged the wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my
    early days in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the
    A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in
    the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious
    explorers of the tubes, which still whiffed faintly of the garbage
    bags they'd once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the
    property's outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the
    tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the
    hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their luster.</P>
    <P>I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If
    they hadn't killed me and forced me to switch to a new
    body, I probably wouldn't be flexible enough to fit
    in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic,
    huh?”</P>
    <P>I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started
    inching my way under the Hall of Presidents.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which
    didn't occur to me until I was forty minutes into the
    pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a
    swimmer's.</P>
    <P>How was I going to reach into my pockets?</P>
    <P>Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my
    back pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows?
    The HERF gun was the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency
    generator with a directional, focused beam that would punch up
    through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn
    scrap of unshielded electronics on the premises. I'd
    gotten the germ of the idea during Tim's first demo,
    when I'd seen all of his prototypes spread out
    backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded.</P>
    <P>“Dan,” I said, my
    voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls.</P>
    <P>“Yeah?” he said.
    He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of his
    painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only
    indicator of his presence.</P>
    <P>“Can you reach my back pocket?”</P>
    <P>“Oh, shit,” he said.</P>
    <P>“Goddamn it,” I said,
    “keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it
    or not?”</P>
    <P>I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt
    his hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves
    into the tube's floor and his hand was pawing around my
    ass.</P>
    <P>“I can reach it,” he
    said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't too
    happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider
    an apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did
    his slow burn.</P>
    <P>He fumbled the gun—a narrow cylinder as long as my
    palm—out of my pocket. “Now what?” he said.</P>
    <P>“Can you pass it up?” I
    asked.</P>
    <P>Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his
    ribcage met my glutes. “I can't get any
    further,” he said.</P>
    <P>“Fine,” I said.
    “You'll have to fire it, then.” I held my breath. Would he do it? It was one thing to be my
    accomplice, another to be the author of the destruction.</P>
    <P>“Aw, Jules,” he said.</P>
    <P>“A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I
    want to hear from you.” I was
    boiling with anger—at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the
    whole goddamn thing.</P>
    <P>“Fine,” he said.</P>
    <P>“Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it
    straight up.”</P>
    <P>I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the
    air, and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd
    confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd
    had a brief vogue.</P>
    <P>“Hang on to it,” I
    said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bit of evidence
    behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next service hatch,
    near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identical
    change of clothes for both of us.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's
    ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of
    Presidents, a collection of influential castmembers from other
    ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity.</P>
    <P>Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up
    behind the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and
    I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was
    going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as
    we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug
    shampoo and fresh electronics.</P>
    <P>We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively,
    while Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe,
    delivered a short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig
    mounted over the stage now, something to allow them to beam us all
    their app in one humongous burst.</P>
    <P>Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of
    applause, and they started the demo.</P>
    <P>Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my
    face as nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new
    file in my public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned
    to Lil to make some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her
    mouth lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row,
    every castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown
    concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD.</P>
    <P>Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted.</P>
    <P>Nothing.</P>
    <P>I was offline.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took
    Lil's hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone,
    our spot for private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette
    from her.</P>
    <P>Lil was upset—even through my bemused, offline haze,
    I could tell that. Tears pricked her eyes.</P>
    <P>“Why didn't you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment's staring into the
    moonlight reflecting off the river.</P>
    <P>“Tell you?” I said,
    dumbly.</P>
    <P>“They're really good. They're
    better than good. They're better than us. Oh, God.”</P>
    <P>Offline, I couldn't find stats or signals to help me
    discuss the matter. Offline, I tried it without help. “I
    don't think so. I don't think they've
    got soul, I don't think they've got history,
    I don't think they've got any kind of
    connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys—they
    visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We
    provide that.” I'm
    offline, and they're not—what the hell
    happened?</P>
    <P>“It'll be okay, Lil. There's
    nothing in that place that's better than us. Different
    and new, but not better. You know that—you've
    spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much
    refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they
    whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing
    we've been maintaining for all these years?”</P>
    <P>She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled.
    “Sorry,” she said. Her
    nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of
    her cheeks. “Sorry—it's just
    shocking. Maybe you're right. And even if you're
    not—hey, that's the whole point of a
    meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets
    supplanted.</P>
    <P>“Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,” she said. “Let's go congratulate
    them.”</P>
    <P>As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for
    having improved her mood without artificial assistance.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the
    Hall, where Debra's ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers
    were celebrating by passing a rock around. Debra had lost the
    tailcoat and hat, and was in an extreme state of relaxation, arms
    around the shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her teeth.</P>
    <P>She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some
    insincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied a
    torch to the bowl.</P>
    <P>“Thanks,” she said,
    laconically. “It was a team effort.” She hugged her cronies to her, almost knocking their heads
    together.</P>
    <P>Lil said, “What's your timeline, then?”</P>
    <P>Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths,
    milestones, requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were
    crazy for that process stuff. I stared at my feet, at the
    floorboards, and realized that they weren't floorboards
    at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper mesh—a
    Faraday cage. That's why the HERF gun hadn't
    done anything; that's why they'd been so
    casual about working with the shielding off their computers. With my
    eye, I followed the copper shielding around the entire stage and up
    the walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling. Once again, I was
    struck by the evolvedness of Debra's ad-hocs, how their
    trial by fire in China had armored them against the kind of
    bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in
    Florida—myself included—came up with.</P>
    <P>For instance, I didn't think there was a single
    castmember in the Park outside of Deb's clique with the
    stones to stage an assassination. Once I'd made that
    leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they staged
    another one—and another, and another. Whatever they
    could get away with.</P>
    <P>Debra's spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed
    away. I stopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway
    between Liberty Square and Fantasyland. “When was the
    last time you backed up?” I asked
    her. If they could go after me, they might go after any of us.</P>
    <P>“Yesterday,” she
    said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking more like an
    overmediated guest than a tireless castmember.</P>
    <P>“Let's run another backup, huh? We should
    really back up at night and at lunchtime—with things the
    way they are, we can't afford to lose an afternoon's
    work, much less a week's.”</P>
    <P>Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when
    she was tired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance.
    “You can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but
    don't tell me how to live my life, okay?”</P>
    <P>“Come on, Lil—it only takes a minute, and
    it'd make me feel a lot better. Please?” I hated the whine in my voice.</P>
    <P>“No, Julius. No. Let's go home and get
    some sleep. I want to do some work on new merch for the
    Mansion—some collectible stuff, maybe.”</P>
    <P>“For Christ's sake, is it really so much
    to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, then, all right?”</P>
    <P>Lil groaned and glared at me.</P>
    <P>I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened.
    Oh, yeah, right, I was offline. A cool sweat broke out all over my
    new body.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something
    about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she'd
    had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the
    corner, shut away from me. I hadn't told her that I was
    offline yet—it just seemed like insignificant personal
    bitching relative to the crises she was coping with.</P>
    <P>Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not
    in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a
    good night's sleep. I could visit the doctor in the
    morning if things were still screwy.</P>
    <P>So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night,
    I had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to
    get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the
    house of all timepieces, anyway?</P>
    <P>Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I
    tried to rouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to
    bed, alone.</P>
    <P>I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt
    of endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as
    I sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so
    I'd long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep
    during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste
    in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing
    coffee.</P>
    <P>“Why didn't you wake me up last night?
    I'm one big ache from sleeping on the couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in.</P>
    <P>She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct
    her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will.
    I felt like punching the wall.</P>
    <P>“You wouldn't get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug,
    then scalded my tongue with it.</P>
    <P>“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would
    cover a shift for me—the merch ideas are really coming
    together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some
    prototyping.”</P>
    <P>“Can't.” I
    foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in
    the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently.</P>
    <P>“Really?” she said,
    and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's
    plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw.</P>
    <P>“Yes. Really. It's your shift—fucking
    work it or call in sick.”</P>
    <P>Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning,
    when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What's
    wrong, honey?” she said, going into
    helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the
    wall.</P>
    <P>“Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with
    fucking merch. I've got real work to do—in
    case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to
    eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her
    teeth with the bones. For God's sake, Lil, don't
    you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you
    have any goddamned passion?”</P>
    <P>Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the
    worst thing I could possibly have said.</P>
    <P>Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends
    of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd
    been just 19—apparent and real—and had a
    bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just
    another airhead castmember.</P>
    <P>Her parents—Tom and Rita—on the other
    hand, were fascinating people, members of the original ad-hoc that
    had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang
    of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it
    as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she
    radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her
    daughter's superficiality into sharp relief.</P>
    <P>They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use.
    In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep,
    travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than
    sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left
    on earth over and over.</P>
    <P>The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals
    had used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing
    homemade costumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the
    control centers, the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot
    July day ticked by, by the thousand. The shareholders'
    lackeys—who worked the Park for the chance to be a part
    of the magic, even if they had no control over the management
    decisions—put up a token resistance. Before the day was
    out, though, the majority had thrown in their lots with the raiders,
    handing over security codes and pitching in.</P>
    <P>“But we knew the shareholders wouldn't
    give in as easy as that,” Lil's
    mother said, sipping her lemonade. “We kept the Park
    running 24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a
    chance to fight back without doing it in front of the guests. We'd
    prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to
    Orlando and the guests came pouring in.” She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features in
    repose were Lil's almost identically. It was only when
    she was talking that her face changed, muscles tugging it into an
    expression decades older than the face that bore it.</P>
    <P>“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at
    Madame Leota's outside the Mansion, gladhanding the
    guests while hissing nasties back and forth with the shareholders
    who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in a sleeping bag on the
    floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in three hour
    shifts. That was when I met this asshole”—she
    chucked her husband on the shoulder—“he'd
    gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldn't
    budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled in next to him and
    the rest, as they say, is history.”</P>
    <P>Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. “Jesus,
    Rita, no one needs to hear about that part of it.”</P>
    <P>Tom patted her arm. “Lil, you're an
    adult—if you can't stomach hearing about
    your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere
    else or grin and bear it. But you don't get to dictate
    the topic of conversation.”</P>
    <P>Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita
    shook her head at Lil's departing backside. “There's
    not much fire in that generation,” she
    said. “Not a lot of passion. It's our
    fault—we thought that Disney World would be the best
    place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe it was,
    but…” She
    trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gesture I'd
    come to know in Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren't
    enough challenges for them these days. They're too
    cooperative.” She laughed and her
    husband took her hand.</P>
    <P>“We sound like our parents,” Tom said. “'When we were growing up,
    we didn't have any of this newfangled life-extension
    stuff—we took our chances with the cave bears and the
    dinosaurs!'” Tom wore
    himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled
    smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air of
    authority to the guests. It was a truism among the first-gen ad-hocs
    that women castmembers should wear themselves young, men old.
    “We're just a couple of Bitchun
    fundamentalists, I guess.”</P>
    <P>Lil called over from a nearby conversation: “Are they
    telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get
    tired of that, why don't you come over here and have a
    smoke?” I noticed that she and her
    cohort were passing a crack pipe.</P>
    <P>“What's the use?” Lil's mother sighed.</P>
    <P>“Oh, I don't know that it's as
    bad as all that,” I said, virtually
    my first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I
    was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who
    flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling
    cliques. “They're passionate about
    maintaining the Park, that's for sure. I made the
    mistake of lifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week
    and I got a very earnest lecture about the smooth functioning of the
    Park from a castmember who couldn't have been more than
    18. I think that they don't have the passion for
    creating Bitchunry that we have—they don't
    need it—but they've got plenty of drive to
    maintain it.”</P>
    <P>Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I
    didn't know what to make of. I couldn't tell
    if I had offended her or what.</P>
    <P>“I mean, you can't be a revolutionary
    after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so
    that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?”</P>
    <P>“Funny you should say that,” Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face.
    “Just yesterday we were talking about the very same
    thing. We were talking—” he
    drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded—“about
    deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in
    fifty or a hundred years.”</P>
    <P>I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my
    time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be
    around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as
    quickly as it came—I was talking to them because they
    were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically
    important.</P>
    <P>“Really? Deadheading.” I
    remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views on the
    cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found
    yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when my last
    living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand
    years. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never quite
    gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to my
    first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque
    and we'd spent the day bounding around the countryside
    on seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand
    Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off
    the day at a dairy commune he knew where they still made cheese from
    cow's milk and there'd been a thousand
    smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I'd
    long since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I'd
    remember forever. And it wasn't so important, then, my
    uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because whatever
    happened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset
    the color of blood and the girl's laugh. 
    </P>
    <P>“Have you talked to Lil about it?”</P>
    <P>Rita shook her head. “It's just a thought,
    really. We don't want to worry her. She's
    not good with hard decisions—it's her
    generation.”</P>
    <P>They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed
    discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than they'd
    intended. I drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we
    toked a little and cuddled a little.</P>
    <P>Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and
    Rita were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not
    to be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting
    material to make it worth their while, and Lil and I were a hot
    item.</P>
    <P>Lil didn't deal well with her parents'
    decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach
    to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers.</P>
    <P>For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get
    fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any
    goddamned passion?</P>
    <P>The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them,
    and Lil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my
    great-granddaughter; Lil, my lover and best friend and sponsor to
    the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned
    on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her runabout
    and went to the Park to take her shift.</P>
    <P>I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its
    lazy turns, and felt like shit.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch5" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 5</H1>
    <P>When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil
    had not come back to the house. If she'd tried to call,
    she would've gotten my voicemail—I had no
    way of answering my phone. As it turned out, she hadn't
    been trying to reach me at all.</P>
    <P>I'd spent the time alternately moping, drinking, and
    plotting terrible, irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me,
    destroying my relationship, taking away my beloved (in hindsight,
    anyway) Hall of Presidents and threatening the Mansion. Even in my
    addled state, I knew that this was pretty unproductive, and I kept
    promising that I would cut it out, take a shower and some sober-ups,
    and get to work at the Mansion.</P>
    <P>I was working up the energy to do just that when Dan came in.</P>
    <P>“Jesus,” he said,
    shocked. I guess I was a bit of a mess, sprawled on the sofa in my
    underwear, all gamy and baggy and bloodshot.</P>
    <P>“Hey, Dan. How's it goin'?”</P>
    <P>He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same
    weird reversal of roles that we'd undergone at the U of
    T, when he had become the native, and I had become the interloper.
    He was the together one with the wry looks and I was the pathetic
    seeker who'd burned all his reputation capital. Out of
    habit, I checked my Whuffie, and a moment later I stopped being
    startled by its low score and was instead shocked by the fact that I
    could check it at all. I was back online!</P>
    <P>“Now, what do you know about that?” I said, staring at my dismal Whuffie.</P>
    <P>“What?” he said.</P>
    <P>I called his cochlea. “My systems are back online,” I subvocalized.</P>
    <P>He started. “You were offline?”</P>
    <P>I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear
    dance. “I <EM>was</EM>, but I'm not <EM>now</EM>.” I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat the
    world—or at least Debra.</P>
    <P>“Let me take a shower, then let's get to
    the Imagineering labs. I've got a pretty kickass
    idea.”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive
    rehab of the Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid
    idea, and I'd gotten what I deserved for it. The whole
    point of the Bitchun Society was to be more reputable than the next
    ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations
    and the like.</P>
    <P>So a rehab it would be.</P>
    <P>“Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in
    California,” I explained, “Walt
    had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve,
    he'd leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as
    they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor
    bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides,
    the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts.”</P>
    <P>Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done
    away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what
    remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded
    Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.</P>
    <P>“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could
    <EM>improvise</EM>. You'd get a slightly different show
    every time. It's like the castmembers who spiel on the
    Jungleboat Cruise. They've each got their own patter,
    their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren't
    so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.”</P>
    <P>“You're going to fill the Mansion with
    castmembers in armor?” Dan asked,
    shaking his head.</P>
    <P>I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve,
    terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes
    around the property. “No,” I
    said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests.
    “Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had
    human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes?
    We'll let them interact with the guests, talk with them,
    scare them… We'll get rid of the
    existing animatronics, replace 'em with full-mobility
    robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! You
    could put, say, a thousand operators online at once, ten shifts per
    day, each of them caught up in our Mansion…
    We'll give out awards for outstanding performances, the
    shifts'll be based on popular vote. In effect, we'll
    be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion's
    throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary
    castmembers.”</P>
    <P>“That's pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and
    flash-baking, but you'll have human interaction,
    courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the world—”</P>
    <P>“And those are the very fans Debra'll have
    to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and
    pitch the idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline
    again. My mood started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead.</P>
    <P>We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab
    aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad
    inventors since the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World.
    The ad-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and
    now ran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic
    labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for anyone so long as the
    ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they
    accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands.</P>
    <P>Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could
    design, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than
    anyone—shirts, sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he
    was the king. They were collaborating on their HUDs, facing each
    other across a lab-bench in the middle of a lab as big as a
    basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkes and gabbling
    away while their eyes danced over invisible screens.</P>
    <P>Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the
    lab, leaving me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly
    delighted by what he saw.</P>
    <P>I nudged him with an elbow. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed.</P>
    <P>Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages
    started to roll out of a printer in the lab's corner.
    Anyone else would have made a big deal out of it, but he just
    brought me into the discussion.</P>
    <P>If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the
    designs she and Suneep had come up with were more than enough.
    She'd been thinking just the way I had—souvenirs
    that stressed the human scale of the Mansion. There were miniature
    animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their
    skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing;
    action figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in
    proximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired
    behaviors—the raven cawed, Mme. Leota's head
    incanted, the singing busts sang. She'd worked up some
    formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this year's
    stylish lines.</P>
    <P>It was good merch, is what I'm trying to say. In my
    mind's eye, I was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in
    six months, filled with robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world
    'round, Mme. Leota's gift cart piled high
    with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the
    guests in the queue area…</P>
    <P>Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored
    over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.</P>
    <P>“Passionate enough for you?” she snapped.</P>
    <P>I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere
    between anger and shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than
    a century older than her, and it was my responsibility to be mature.
    Also, I'd started the fight.</P>
    <P>“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn't soften. “Really
    choice stuff. I had a great idea—” I ran it down for her, the avatars, the robots, the rehab.
    She stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling, showing me her
    dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners.</P>
    <P>“This isn't easy,” she said, finally. Suneep, who'd been politely
    pretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too.</P>
    <P>“I know that,” I
    said. The flush burned hotter. “But that's
    the point—what Debra does isn't easy either.
    It's risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc
    better—it made them sharper.” <EM>Sharper than us, that's for sure</EM>.
    “They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them
    just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too.”</P>
    <P>Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd
    just popped out, but I saw that I'd been right—we'd
    have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.</P>
    <P>“I understand what you're saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was upset—she'd
    reverted to castmemberspeak. “It's a very
    good idea. I think that we stand a good chance of making it happen
    if we approach the group and put it to them, after doing the
    research, building the plans, laying out the critical path, and
    privately soliciting feedback from some of them.”</P>
    <P>I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the
    Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal
    requirements reviews while Debra's people tore down the
    Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic.</P>
    <P>“Suneep, you've been involved in some
    rehabs, right?”</P>
    <P>Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical
    animal being drawn into a political discussion.</P>
    <P>“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan
    and asked you to pull together a production schedule—one
    that didn't have any review, just take the idea and run
    with it—and then pull it off, how long would it take you
    to execute it?”</P>
    <P>Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering
    before.</P>
    <P>“About five years,” he
    said, almost instantly.</P>
    <P>“Five years?” I
    squawked. “Why five years? Debra's people
    overhauled the Hall in a month!”</P>
    <P>“Oh, wait,” he said.
    “No review at all?”</P>
    <P>“No review. Just come up with the best way you can to
    do this, and do it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled
    labor, three shifts around the clock.”</P>
    <P>He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while
    muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of
    curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly
    stubby fingers while he thought.</P>
    <P>“About eight weeks,” he
    said. “Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts,
    unlimited labor, capable management, material availability…” He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he
    pulled up a HUD and started making a list.</P>
    <P>“Wait,” Lil said,
    alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eight
    weeks?”</P>
    <P>Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how
    Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes
    and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck
    was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating
    groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work.</P>
    <P>Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is
    satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won't
    fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans
    aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll be halfway
    through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach
    that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it's
    back to the drawing board… So I stay at the
    drawing board for a long time at the start, get feedback from other
    Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups and the Net. Then we
    do reviews at every stage of construction, check to see if anyone
    has had a great idea we haven't thought of and
    incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work.</P>
    <P>“It's slow, but it works.”</P>
    <P>Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete
    revision in eight weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another
    revision, do <EM>that</EM> one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take
    five years before anyone can ride the thing?”</P>
    <P>“Because that's how it's
    done,” I said to Lil. “But
    that's not how it <EM>has</EM> to be done. That's
    how we'll save the Mansion.”</P>
    <P>I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was
    right. Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the
    organization needed to turn on a dime—that would be even
    <EM>more</EM> Bitchun.</P>
    <P>“Lil,” I said,
    looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her. “We
    have to do this. It's our only chance. We'll
    recruit hundreds to come to Florida and work on the rehab. We'll
    give every Mansion nut on the planet a shot at joining up, then
    we'll recruit them again to work at it, to run the
    telepresence rigs. We'll get buy-in from the biggest
    super-recommenders in the world, and we'll build
    something better and faster than any ad-hoc ever has, without
    abandoning the original Imagineers' vision. It will be
    unspeakably Bitchun.”</P>
    <P>Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the
    floor, hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still
    angry with me, but excited and scared and yes, passionate.</P>
    <P>“It's not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan and I exchanged wicked
    grins. She was in.</P>
    <P>“I know,” I said. But
    it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader in the
    Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth,
    someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a
    crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This
    plan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied
    it, in short order, but by the time that happened, she'd
    have plenty of Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc.</P>
    <P>“I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd
    like to study the plans that Imagineering comes through with, do
    some walk-throughs—”</P>
    <P>I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence,
    but she beat me to it.</P>
    <P>“But I won't. We have to move fast. I'm
    in.”</P>
    <P>She didn't come into my arms, didn't kiss
    me and tell me everything was forgiven, but she bought in, and that
    was enough.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly
    noticed, I was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was
    it ever audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in
    1969, no one had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh,
    sure, the Paris version, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different
    storyline, but it was just a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the
    European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend.</P>
    <P>What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd
    been to Disney World any number of times as a guest before I settled
    in, and truth be told, it had never been my absolute favorite.</P>
    <P>But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly
    bored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd
    found myself crowd-driven to it.</P>
    <P>I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks
    with. Since I was a punk kid snaking my way through crowded subway
    platforms, eeling into the only seat on a packed car, I'd
    been obsessed with Beating The Crowd.</P>
    <P>In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a
    blackjack player, a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of
    odds. He was a pudgy, unassuming engineer, the moderately successful
    founder of a moderately successful high-tech startup that had done
    something arcane with software agents. While he was only moderately
    successful, he was fabulously wealthy: he'd never raised
    a cent of financing for his company, and had owned it outright when
    he finally sold it for a bathtub full of money. His secret was the
    green felt tables of Vegas, where he'd pilgrim off to
    every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards
    and calculate the odds and Beat The House.</P>
    <P>Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd
    made his nut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the
    tables, grinding out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer
    satisfaction of Beating The House. For him, it was pure
    brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every time the dealer busted and
    every time he doubled down on a deckfull of face cards.</P>
    <P>Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket,
    I immediately got his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd,
    finding the path of least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the
    short queue, dodging the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to
    spare—moving with precision and grace and, above all,
    <EM>expedience</EM>.</P>
    <P>On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness
    Campground, pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to
    catch a barge over to the Main Gate.</P>
    <P>Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the
    ticketing queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the
    farthest one, beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would
    have the shortest wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey
    of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of
    each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd have been primarily interested in
    their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other
    than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles,
    their dress, and more than anything, their burdens.</P>
    <P>You can tell more about someone's ability to
    efficiently negotiate the complexities of a queue through what they
    carry than through any other means—if only more people
    realized it. The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a
    person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To
    the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for
    a fast transaction, but I'd done an informal study and
    come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the
    flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification,
    patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing
    implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a
    rosary, a tuna sandwich.</P>
    <P>No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road
    Worrier anytime. Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with
    four or five carriers of one description or another, from bulging
    cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with
    biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the
    ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance,
    are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access?
    Someone who's given that much consideration to their
    gear is likely spending their time in line determining which bits
    and pieces they'll need when they reach its headwaters
    and is holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing.</P>
    <P>This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders,
    gear-pigs who pack <EM>everything</EM> because they lack the
    organizational smarts to figure out what they should
    pack—they're just as apt to be burdened with
    bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of
    that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads,
    juggling this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their
    shoulders.</P>
    <P>I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a
    queue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and
    ticced nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other
    spots I could've chosen. I was borne out, a positive
    omen for a wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main Street,
    USA long before my ferrymates.</P>
    <P>Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My
    parents had brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as
    the first inklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into
    everyone's consciousness: the death of scarcity, the
    death of death, the struggle to rejig an economy that had grown up
    focused on nothing but scarcity and death. My memories of the trip
    are dim but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smiling
    faces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover
    cars, past diorama after diorama.</P>
    <P>I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the
    richness of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent
    a week there stunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to
    corner. Someday, I knew, I'd come to live there.</P>
    <P>The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world where
    everything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park,
    grounding myself, communing with all the people I'd
    been.</P>
    <P>That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out
    the short lines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to
    capacity. I'd take high ground, standing on a bench or
    hopping up on a fence, and do a visual reccy of all the queues in
    sight, try to spot prevailing currents in the flow of the crowd,
    generally having a high old obsessive time. Truth be told, I
    probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I would've
    spent lining up like a good little sheep, but I had more fun and got
    more exercise.</P>
    <P>The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the
    Snow Crash Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square
    en route to Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it,
    dancing to the JapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the
    movements of the brave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty
    Square was a ghost town, and I grabbed the opportunity to ride the
    Mansion five times in a row, walking on every time.</P>
    <P>The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the
    Mansion, but to tell the truth it was the other way around.</P>
    <P>The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive
    air conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my
    skin. But on the third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn
    cool the thing was. There wasn't a single bit of tech
    more advanced than a film-loop projector in the whole place, but it
    was all so cunningly contrived that the illusion of a haunted house
    was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroom were
    <EM>ghosts</EM>, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic. The
    ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard were
    equally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously creepy.</P>
    <P>My fourth pass through, I noticed the <EM>detail</EM>, the
    hostile eyes worked into the wallpaper's pattern, the
    motif repeated in the molding, the chandeliers, the photo gallery. I
    began to pick out the words to “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether in
    sinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or the
    spritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard.</P>
    <P>It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth
    pass through, this time noticing that the overaggressive AC was,
    actually, mysterious chills that blew through the rooms as wandering
    spirits made their presence felt. By the time I debarked for the
    fifth time, I was whistling the tune with jazzy improvisations in a
    mixed-up tempo.</P>
    <P>That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was
    picking up a discarded ice-cream wrapper—I'd
    seen a dozen castmembers picking up trash that day, seen it so
    frequently that I'd started doing it myself. She grinned
    slyly at me as I debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectant
    perfume of the Park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleased with
    myself for having so completely <EM>experienced</EM> a really fine
    hunk of art.</P>
    <P>I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the
    Whuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly
    entertainment should notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work.</P>
    <P>“That's really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the titanic mountains of Whuffie my
    HUD attributed to her.</P>
    <P>She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but
    castmembers of her generation can't help but be
    friendly. She compromised between ghastly demeanor and her natural
    sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me, thumped through a zombie's
    curtsey, and moaned “Thank you—we <EM>do</EM>
    try to keep it <EM>spirited</EM>.”</P>
    <P>I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very
    cute she was, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's
    uniform and her feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and
    scrubbed and happy about everything, she radiated it and made me
    want to pinch her cheeks—either set.</P>
    <P>The moment was on me, and so I said, “When do they let
    you ghouls off? I'd love to take you out for a Zombie or
    a Bloody Mary.”</P>
    <P>Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for
    a couple at the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in
    the process and losing my nerve, telling myself that there was
    nothing we could possibly have to say to each other across a
    century-wide gap.</P>
    <P>While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second,
    the reverse is indeed true. But it's also true—and
    I never told her this—that the thing I love best about
    the Mansion is:</P>
    <P>It's where I met her.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for
    the telepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in
    a totally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could
    transcribe it. Jamming on ideas with Dan was just about as terrific
    as a pass-time could be.</P>
    <P>I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting
    hearts-and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it
    down.</P>
    <P>She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking
    among the rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and
    she didn't want the appearance of impropriety that would
    come from having outsiders being brought in before the ad-hoc.</P>
    <P>Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around—it was a
    skill I'd never really mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil
    was good at it, but me, I think that I was too self-centered to ever
    develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed
    that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no
    patience for explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers
    who just didn't get it.</P>
    <P>The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy,
    but I'm hardly a genius. Especially when it comes to
    people. Probably comes from Beating The Crowd, never seeing
    individuals, just the mass—the enemy of expedience.</P>
    <P>I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my
    own. Lil made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping
    together. I'd assumed that her folks would be my best
    allies in the process of joining up, but they were too jaded, too
    ready to take the long sleep to pay much attention to a newcomer
    like me.</P>
    <P>Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties,
    talking me up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my
    thesis-work. And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling
    the virtues of the others I met, so that I knew what there was to
    respect about them and couldn't help but treat them as
    individuals.</P>
    <P>In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I
    palled around with Lil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with
    net-friends around the world. The ad-hocs that I worked with all day
    treated me with basic courtesy but not much friendliness.</P>
    <P>I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind,
    they were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the
    starchy world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything.</P>
    <P>Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for
    address lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe,
    spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of
    course, their Whuffie.</P>
    <P>“That's weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was
    using—my systems were back offline. They'd
    been sputtering up and down for a couple days now, and I kept
    meaning to go to the doctor, but I'd never gotten
    'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt
    of urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was
    stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence.</P>
    <P>“Huh?” he said.</P>
    <P>I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a collection of animated 3-D
    meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part of a giant
    collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to build an
    accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd
    used those meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.</P>
    <P>“Those are terrific,” Dan
    said. “That guy must be a total <EM>fiend</EM>.” The meshes' author had painstakingly modeled,
    chained and animated every ghost in the ballroom scene, complete
    with the kinematics necessary for full motion. Where a “normal” fan-artist might've used a standard human
    kinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written
    his own from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral
    fluidity that was utterly unhuman.</P>
    <P>“Who's the author?” Dan asked. “Do we have him on our list yet?”</P>
    <P>I scrolled down to display the credits. “I'll
    be damned,” Dan breathed.</P>
    <P>The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd
    submitted the designs a week before my assassination.</P>
    <P>“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas on the subject
    myself.</P>
    <P>“Tim's a Mansion nut,” Dan said. “I knew that.”</P>
    <P>“You knew?”</P>
    <P>He looked a little defensive. “Sure. I told you, back
    when you had me hanging out with Debra's gang.”</P>
    <P>Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it
    had been his suggestion. Too much to think about.</P>
    <P>“But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we
    try to recruit him? Or is he the one that'd convinced
    Debra she needs to take over the Mansion?”</P>
    <P>Dan shook his head. “I'm not even sure
    that she wants to take over the Mansion. I know Debra, all she wants
    to do is turn ideas into things, as fast and as copiously as
    possible. She picks her projects carefully. She's
    acquisitive, sure, but she's cautious. She had a great
    idea for Presidents, and so she took over. I never heard her talk
    about the Mansion.”</P>
    <P>“Of course you didn't. She's
    cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hall of Presidents?”</P>
    <P>Dan fumbled. “Not really… I mean, not in so many words, but—”</P>
    <P>“But nothing,” I
    said. “She's after the Mansion, she's
    after the Magic Kingdom, she's after the Park. She's
    taking over, goddamn it, and I'm the only one who seems
    to have noticed.”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were
    fighting. Fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan
    had taken to sleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than
    endure it.</P>
    <P>I'd started it, of course. “We're
    going to get killed if we don't get off our asses and
    start the rehab,” I said, slamming
    myself down on the sofa and kicking at the scratched coffee table. I
    heard the hysteria and unreason in my voice and it just made me
    madder. I was frustrated by not being able to check in on Suneep and
    Dan, and, as usual, it was too late at night to call anyone and do
    anything about it. By the morning, I'd have forgotten
    again.</P>
    <P>From the kitchen, Lil barked back, “I'm
    doing what I can, Jules. If you've got a better way,
    I'd love to hear about it.”</P>
    <P>“Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can,
    planning the thing out. I'm ready to <EM>go</EM>. It was
    your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep telling me
    they're not. When will they be?”</P>
    <P>“Jesus, you're a nag.”</P>
    <P>“I wouldn't nag if you'd only
    fucking make it happen. What are you doing all day, anyway? Working
    shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deck chairs on the Great Titanic
    Adventure?”</P>
    <P>“I'm working my fucking <EM>ass</EM> off.
    I've spoken to every goddamn one of them at least twice
    this week about it.”</P>
    <P>“Sure,” I hollered at
    the kitchen. “Sure you have.”</P>
    <P>“Don't take my word for it, then. Check my
    fucking phone logs.”</P>
    <P>She waited.</P>
    <P>“Well? Check them!”</P>
    <P>“I'll check them later,” I said, dreading where this was going.</P>
    <P>“Oh, no you <EM>don't</EM>,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming. “You
    can't call me a liar and then refuse to look at the
    evidence.” She planted her hands on
    her slim little hips and glared at me. She'd gone pale
    and I could count every freckle on her face, her throat, her
    collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt
    I'd given her on a day-trip to Nassau.</P>
    <P>“Well?” she asked.
    She looked ready to wring my neck.</P>
    <P>“I can't,” I
    admitted, not meeting her eyes.</P>
    <P>“Yes you can—here, I'll dump
    it to your public directory.”</P>
    <P>Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to
    locate me on her network. “What's going
    on?”</P>
    <P>So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning.</P>
    <P>“Well, why haven't you gone to the doctor?
    I mean, it's been <EM>weeks</EM>. I'll call
    him right now.”</P>
    <P>“Forget it,” I said.
    “I'll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting
    him out of bed.”</P>
    <P>But I didn't see him the day after, or the day after
    that. Too much to do, and the only times I remembered to call
    someone, I was too far from a public terminal or it was too late or
    too early. My systems came online a couple times, and I was too busy
    with the plans for the Mansion. Lil grew accustomed to the drifts of
    hard copy that littered the house, to printing out her annotations
    to my designs and leaving them on my favorite chair—to
    living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by
    dead trees and ticking clocks.</P>
    <P>Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for
    it—I obsessed. I sat in front of the terminal I'd
    brought home all day, every day, crunching plans, dictating
    voicemail. People who wanted to reach me had to haul ass out to the
    house, and <EM>speak</EM> to me.</P>
    <P>I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was
    my turn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard
    wouldn't keep him up nights. He and Lil were working a
    full-time campaign to recruit the ad-hoc to our cause, and I started
    to feel like we were finally in harmony, about to reach our goal.</P>
    <P>I went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst
    into the living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my
    original plan that would add a third walk-through segment to the
    ride, increasing the number of telepresence rigs we could use
    without decreasing throughput.</P>
    <P>I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public
    chatter in the room sprang up on my HUD.</P>
    <P><EM>And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of
    clothing and jump you.</EM></P>
    <P><EM>And then what?</EM></P>
    <P><EM>I'm going to bang you till you limp.</EM></P>
    <P><EM>Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl.</EM></P>
    <P>My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing
    letters. Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at
    Lil, who was flushed and distracted. Dan looked scared.</P>
    <P>“What's going on, Dan?” I asked quietly. My heart hammered in my chest, but I felt
    calm and detached.</P>
    <P>“Jules,” he began,
    then gave up and looked at Lil.</P>
    <P>Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that
    their secret messaging had been discovered.</P>
    <P>“Having fun, Lil?” I
    asked.</P>
    <P>Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius.
    I'll send your stuff to the hotel.”</P>
    <P>“You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he
    limps?”</P>
    <P>“This is my house, Julius. I'm asking you
    to get out of it. I'll see you at work
    tomorrow—we're having a general ad-hoc
    meeting to vote on the rehab.”</P>
    <P>It was her house.</P>
    <P>“Lil, Julius—” Dan began.</P>
    <P>“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.”</P>
    <P>I dropped my papers—I wanted to throw them, but I
    dropped them, <EM>flump</EM>, and I turned on my heel and walked
    out, not bothering to close the door behind me.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on
    my door. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle
    of tequila—<EM>my</EM> tequila, brought over from the
    house that I'd shared with Lil.</P>
    <P>He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I
    took the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and
    poured.</P>
    <P>“It's my fault,” he said.</P>
    <P>“I'm sure it is,” I said.</P>
    <P>“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was
    really upset. Hadn't seen you in days, and when she <EM>did</EM>
    see you, you freaked her out. Snapping at her. Arguing. Insulting
    her.”</P>
    <P>“So you made her,” I
    said.</P>
    <P>He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “I did.
    It's been a long time since I…”</P>
    <P>“You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I
    was away, working.”</P>
    <P>“Jules, I'm sorry. I did it, and I kept on
    doing it. I'm not much of a friend to either of you.</P>
    <P>“She's pretty broken up. She wanted me to
    come out here and tell you it was all a mistake, that you were just
    being paranoid.”</P>
    <P>We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my
    own.</P>
    <P>“I couldn't do that,” he said. “I'm worried about you. You
    haven't been right, not for months. I don't
    know what it is, but you should get to a doctor.”</P>
    <P>“I don't need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbness and left
    burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “I need a
    friend who doesn't fuck my girlfriend when my back is
    turned.”</P>
    <P>I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving
    tequila-stains on the wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan
    started, but stayed seated. If he'd stood up, I
    would've hit him. Dan's good at crises.</P>
    <P>“If it's any consolation, I expect to be
    dead pretty soon,” he said. He gave
    me a wry grin. “My Whuffie's doing good. This
    rehab should take it up over the top. I'll be ready to
    go.”</P>
    <P>That stopped me. I'd somehow managed to forget that
    Dan, my good friend Dan, was going to kill himself.</P>
    <P>“You're going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to think about it.
    I really liked the bastard. He might've been my best
    friend.</P>
    <P>There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the
    peephole. It was Lil.</P>
    <P>She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A
    snide remark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her.</P>
    <P>She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her
    embrace.</P>
    <P>“No,” he said, and
    stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down at the Seven Seas
    Lagoon.</P>
    <P>“Dan's just been explaining to me that he
    plans on being dead in a couple months,” I
    said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn't
    it, Lil?”</P>
    <P>Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on
    herself. “I'll take what I can get,” she said.</P>
    <P>I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not
    Lil, whose loss upset me the most.</P>
    <P>Lil took Dan's hand and led him out of the room.</P>
    <P><EM>I guess I'll take what I can get, too</EM>, I
    thought.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch6" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 6</H1>
    <P>Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the
    ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts.</P>
    <P>It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun
    Society, and even though there were cures, they weren't
    pleasant.</P>
    <P>I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and
    I was living for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called
    her Zed.</P>
    <P>We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the
    famed low-gravity sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much
    fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg eight, it's a
    blast. You don't stagger, you <EM>bounce</EM>, and when
    you're bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing,
    happy, boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun.</P>
    <P>I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in
    diameter, filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure
    bulbs of fruity, deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered
    the sphere's floor, and if you knew how to play, you'd
    snag one, tether it to you and start playing. Others would pick up
    their own axes and jam along. The tunes varied from terrific to
    awful, but they were always energetic.</P>
    <P>I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever
    I thought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time
    in the sphere playing it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in
    gave me new and interesting lines of inquiry, and that was good.
    Even when they didn't, playing an instrument was a fast
    track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger.</P>
    <P>Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out
    barrelhouse runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the
    movement on a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short
    while I came to a dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my
    music, and it was really <EM>good</EM>. I'm a sucker for
    musicians.</P>
    <P>We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as
    spheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully
    into the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were
    the perp who killed her partner.</P>
    <P>I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the
    bubble. The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus
    to applaud. She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway,
    and headed for the hatch.</P>
    <P>I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere,
    desperate to reach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was
    leaving.</P>
    <P>“Hey!” I said.
    “That was great! I'm Julius! How're
    you doing?”</P>
    <P>She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unit
    simultaneously—not hard, you understand, but playfully.
    “Honk!” she said, and
    squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning chub-on.</P>
    <P>I chased after her. “Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the spoke of the station
    towards the gravity.</P>
    <P>She had a pianist's body—re-engineered
    arms and hands that stretched for impossible lengths, and she used
    them with a spacehand's grace, vaulting herself forward
    at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could on my freshman
    spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of the
    station, she was gone.</P>
    <P>I didn't find her again until the next movement was
    done and I went to the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just
    getting warmed up when she passed through the hatch and tied off to
    the piano.</P>
    <P>This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her
    before moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's
    top, looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4
    time and I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues
    to rock to folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled
    at me, I noodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly
    whenever I managed a smidge of tuneful wit.</P>
    <P>She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red
    downy fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style,
    suited to the climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty
    years later, I was dating Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my
    first.</P>
    <P>I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements
    at the keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out
    a particularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a
    slow bridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as
    long as I could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the
    hatch.</P>
    <P>When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I
    summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She
    calmly untied and floated over to me.</P>
    <P>I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd
    been staring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started
    at their corners and spread right down to her long, elegant toes.
    She looked back at me, then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint
    again.</P>
    <P>“You'll do,” she
    said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across the station.</P>
    <P>We didn't sleep.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch
    broadband constellations that went up at the cusp of the world's
    ascent into Bitchunry. She'd been exposed to a lot of
    hard rads and low gee and had generally become pretty transhuman as
    time went by, upgrading with a bewildering array of third-party
    enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the RF
    spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a
    completely mechanical spine that wasn't prone to any of
    the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like
    lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped
    discs.</P>
    <P>I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything
    on Zed. She only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and
    kissing wouldn't do, and routinely slapped upgrades into
    herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when
    she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon
    getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.</P>
    <P>I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to
    strangle her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a
    couple of days, floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at
    its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing if I was inside,
    but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn't,
    and she was making faces for anyone's benefit.</P>
    <P>But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and
    her eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic
    skin cool with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry
    game of tag through the station, the mess hall where we skidded
    sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where
    she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living
    quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus.</P>
    <P>You'd have thought that we'd have
    followed it up with an act of our own, and truth be told, that was
    certainly my expectation when we started the game I came to think of
    as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway through, I'd
    lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike
    innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly
    feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous
    corner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that
    crazy pair that's always zipping in and zipping away,
    like having your party crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers.</P>
    <P>When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live
    with me until the universe's mainspring unwound, she
    laughed, honked my nose and my willie and shouted, “YOU'LL
    <EM>DO</EM>!”</P>
    <P>I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories
    underground in overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie
    wasn't so hot earthside, and the endless institutional
    corridors made her feel at home while affording her opportunities
    for mischief.</P>
    <P>But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking
    more. At first, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent
    wife was finally acting normal, making nice with the neighbors
    instead of pranking them with endless honks and fanny-kicks and
    squirt guns. We gave up the steeplechase and she had the doglegs
    taken out, her fur removed, her eyes unsilvered to a hazel that was
    pretty and as fathomable as the silver had been inscrutable.</P>
    <P>We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my
    symphony in low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could
    drum up, and she came out and didn't play, just sat to
    the side and smiled and smiled with a smile that never went beyond
    her lips.</P>
    <P>She went nuts.</P>
    <P>She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with
    knives. She accused me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the
    neighbors' apartments, wrapped herself in plastic
    sheeting, dry-humped the furniture.</P>
    <P>She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of
    our bedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after
    rant. I smiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then
    I grabbed her and hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor's
    office on the second floor. She'd been dirtside for a
    year and nuts for a month, but it took me that long to face up to
    it.</P>
    <P>The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way of
    saying that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In
    other words, I'd driven her nuts.</P>
    <P>You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically
    trying to talk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She
    didn't want to.</P>
    <P>She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of
    lucidity that she had under sedation, she consented to being
    restored from a backup that was made before we came to Toronto.</P>
    <P>I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had
    prepared a written synopsis of the events since her last backup for
    her, and she read it over the next couple days.</P>
    <P>“Julius,” she said,
    while I was making breakfast in our subterranean apartment. She
    sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediately that the
    news wouldn't be good.</P>
    <P>“Yes?” I said,
    setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups of coffee.</P>
    <P>“I'm going to go back to space, and revert
    to an older version.” She had a
    shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on.</P>
    <P><EM>Oh, shit.</EM> “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental inventory
    of my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a minute or
    two, I'll pack up. I miss space, too.”</P>
    <P>She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable
    hazel eyes. “No. I'm going back to who I was,
    before I met you.”</P>
    <P>It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved
    her fun and mischief. The Zed she'd become after we wed
    was terrible and terrifying, but I'd stuck with her out
    of respect for the person she'd been.</P>
    <P>Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she
    met me. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over
    again, revert to a saved version.</P>
    <P>Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker.</P>
    <P>I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in
    the sphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending
    from his hips. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig
    on the piano, and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn't
    a shred of recognition in them. She'd never met me.</P>
    <P>I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and
    sojourning to Disney World, there to reinvent myself with a new
    group of friends, a new career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed
    again—especially not to Lil, who hardly needed me to
    pollute her with remembrances of my crazy exes.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts
    that Zed had gone. It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me
    alienating my friends, sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend
    into my best friend's arms.</P>
    <P>I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd
    run the rehab past the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had
    to get my priorities straight.</P>
    <P>I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to
    the Monorail station in the main lobby. The platform was jammed with
    happy guests, bright and cheerful and ready for a day of steady,
    hypermediated fun. I tried to make myself attend to them as
    individuals, but try as I might, they kept turning into a crowd, and
    I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform to keep from weaving
    among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat.</P>
    <P>The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in
    Adventureland, just steps from where I'd been turned
    into a road-pizza by the still-unidentified assassin. The
    Adventureland ad-hocs owed the Liberty Square crew a favor since my
    death had gone down on their turf, so they had given us use of their
    prize meeting room, where the Florida sun streamed through the slats
    of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filled shafts of light
    across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums and the spieling
    Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-key ambient buzz
    from two of the Park's oldest rides.</P>
    <P>There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew,
    almost all second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They
    filled the room to capacity, and there was much hugging and
    handshaking before the meeting came to order. I was thankful that
    the room was too small for the <EM>de rigueur</EM> ad-hoc
    circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand at a podium and
    command a smidge of respect.</P>
    <P>“Hi there!” she said,
    brightly. The weepy puffiness was still present around her eyes, if
    you knew how to look for it, but she was expert at putting on a
    brave face no matter what the ache.</P>
    <P>The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at their own corny tradition. Oh, they sure were
    a barrel of laughs at the Magic Kingdom.</P>
    <P>“Everybody knows why we're here, right?” Lil said, with a self-deprecating smile. She'd
    been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. “Does anyone
    have any questions about the plans? We'd like to start
    executing right away.”</P>
    <P>A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in
    the air. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ‘right away,’ do you mean—”</P>
    <P>I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We're
    on an eight-week production schedule, and the sooner we start, the
    sooner it'll be finished.”</P>
    <P>The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. I
    shrugged. Politics was not my game.</P>
    <P>Lil said, “Don, we're trying something new
    here, a really streamlined process. The good part is, the process is
    <EM>short</EM>. In a couple months, we'll know if it's
    working for us. If it's not, hey, we can turn it around
    in a couple months, too. That's why we're
    not spending as much time planning as we usually do. It won't
    take five years for the idea to prove out, so the risks are
    lower.”</P>
    <P>Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherly
    demeanor said, “I'm all for moving
    fast—Lord knows, our pacing hasn't always
    been that hot. But I'm concerned about all these new
    people you propose to recruit—won't having
    more people slow us down when it comes to making new decisions?”</P>
    <P><EM>No</EM>, I thought sourly, <EM>because the people I'm
    bringing in aren't addicted to meetings</EM>.</P>
    <P>Lil nodded. “That's a good point, Lisa.
    The offer we're making to the telepresence players is
    probationary—they don't get to vote until
    after we've agreed that the rehab is a success.”</P>
    <P>Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset,
    self-important jerk who loved to work the front door, even though he
    blew his spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “I think you're
    really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, all of us,
    and so do the guests. It's a piece of history, and
    we're its custodians, not its masters. Changing it like
    this, well…” he
    shook his head. “It's not good stewardship.
    If the guests wanted to walk through a funhouse with guys jumping
    out of the shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’
    they'd go to one of the Halloween Houses in their
    hometowns. The Mansion's better than that. I can't
    be a part of this plan.”</P>
    <P>I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I'd
    delivered essentially the same polemic a thousand times—in
    reference to Debra's work—and hearing it
    from this jerk in reference to <EM>mine</EM> made me go all hot and
    red inside.</P>
    <P>“Look,” I said. “If
    we don't do this, if we don't change things,
    they'll get changed <EM>for</EM> us. By someone else.
    The question, <EM>Dave</EM>, is whether a responsible custodian lets
    his custodianship be taken away from him, or whether he does
    everything he can to make sure that he's still around to
    ensure that his charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship
    isn't sticking your head in the sand.”</P>
    <P>I could tell I wasn't doing any good. The mood of the
    crowd was getting darker, the faces more set. I resolved not to
    speak again until the meeting was done, no matter what the
    provocation.</P>
    <P>Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it
    looked like the objections would continue all afternoon and all
    night and all the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and
    miserable all at the same time, staring at Lil and her harried smile
    and her nervous smoothing of her hair over her ears.</P>
    <P>Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were
    collected in secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels.
    The group's eyes unfocussed as they called up HUDs and
    watched the totals as they rolled in. I was offline and unable to
    vote or watch.</P>
    <P>At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her
    hands behind her back.</P>
    <P>“All right then,” she
    said, over the crowd's buzz. “Let's
    get to work.”</P>
    <P>I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other's
    eyes, a meaningful glance between new lovers, and I saw red.
    Literally. My vision washed over pink, and a strobe pounded at the
    edges of my vision. I took two lumbering steps towards them and
    opened my mouth to say something horrible, and what came out was
    “Waaagh.” My right side
    went numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I crashed to the
    floor.</P>
    <P>The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest
    as I tried to struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went
    black.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I wasn't nuts after all.</P>
    <P>The doctor's office in the Main Street infirmary was
    clean and white and decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in
    doctors' whites with an outsized stethoscope. I came to
    on a hard pallet under a sign that reminded me to get a check-up
    twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bring my hands up to shield my
    eyes from the over bright light and the over-cheerful signage, and
    discovered that I couldn't move my arms. Further
    investigation revealed that this was because I was strapped down, in
    full-on four-point restraint.</P>
    <P>“Waaagh,” I said
    again.</P>
    <P>Dan's worried face swam into my field of vision,
    along with a serious-looking doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman
    Rockwell face full of crow'sfeet and smile-lines.</P>
    <P>“Welcome back, Julius. I'm Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a kindly voice that matched the face.
    Despite my recent disillusion with castmember bullshit, I found his
    schtick comforting.</P>
    <P>I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in
    my eyes and consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in
    stoic silence, too confounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to
    attempt more speech. The doc would tell me what was going on when he
    was ready.</P>
    <P>“Does he need to be tied up still?” Dan asked, and I shook my head urgently. Being tied up
    wasn't my idea of a good time.</P>
    <P>The doc smiled kindly. “I think it's for
    the best, for now. Don't worry, Julius, we'll
    have you up and about soon enough.”</P>
    <P>Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him
    out of the room. He took my hand instead.</P>
    <P>My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse,
    until it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that
    strobed at the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face,
    rattled at my restraints. The doc absentmindedly noticed my
    gyrations and delicately scratched my nose with a gloved finger. The
    relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nuts didn't start
    itching anytime soon.</P>
    <P>Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that
    caused the head of the bed to raise up so that I could look him in
    the eye.</P>
    <P>“Well, now,” he said,
    stroking his chin. “Julius, you've got a
    problem. Your friend here tells me your systems have been offline
    for more than a month. It sure would've been better if
    you'd come in to see me when it started up.</P>
    <P>“But you didn't, and things got worse.” He nodded up at Jiminy Cricket's recriminations:
    Go ahead, see your doc! “It's good advice,
    son, but what's done is done. You were restored from a
    backup about eight weeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can't
    be sure, but my theory is that the brain-machine interface they
    installed at that time had a material defect. It's been
    deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. The shut-downs
    are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducing the
    kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interface
    senses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnostic
    mode, attempts to fix itself and come back online.</P>
    <P>“Well, that's fine for minor problems, but
    in cases like this, it's bad news. The interface has
    been deteriorating steadily, and it's only a matter of
    time before it does some serious damage.”</P>
    <P>“Waaagh?” I asked. I
    meant to say, <EM>All right, but what's wrong with my
    mouth?</EM></P>
    <P>The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don't
    try. The interface has locked up, and it's taken some of
    your voluntary nervous processes with it. In time, it'll
    probably shut down, but for now, there's no point.
    That's why we've got you strapped down—you
    were thrashing pretty hard when they brought you in, and we didn't
    want you to hurt yourself.”</P>
    <P><EM>Probably shut down</EM>? Jesus. I could end up stuck like
    this forever. I started shaking.</P>
    <P>The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed
    a transdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal's
    sedative oozed into my bloodstream.</P>
    <P>“There, there,” he
    said. “It's nothing permanent. We can grow
    you a new clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately,
    that backup is a few months old. If we'd caught it
    earlier, we may've been able to salvage a current
    backup, but given the deterioration you've displayed to
    date… Well, there just wouldn't
    be any point.”</P>
    <P>My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months—lose
    it all, never happened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents
    and my shameful attempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan,
    the meeting. My plans for the rehab! All of it, good and bad, every
    moment flensed away.</P>
    <P>I couldn't do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was
    the only one who understood how it had to be done. Without my
    relentless prodding, the ad-hocs would surely revert to their old,
    safe ways. They might even leave it half-done, halt the process for
    an interminable review, present a soft belly for Debra to savage.</P>
    <P>I wouldn't be restoring from backup.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and
    shut itself down. I remember the first, a confusion of
    vision-occluding strobes and uncontrollable thrashing and the taste
    of copper, but the second happened without waking me from deep
    unconsciousness.</P>
    <P>When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He
    had a day's growth of beard and new worrylines at the
    corners of his newly rejuvenated eyes. The doctor came in, shaking
    his head.</P>
    <P>“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I've
    drawn up the consent forms for the refresh and the new clone will be
    ready in an hour or two. In the meantime, I think heavy sedation is
    in order. Once the restore's been completed, we'll
    retire this body for you and we'll be all finished
    up.”</P>
    <P>Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant.</P>
    <P>“No,” I said. I
    thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under my control!</P>
    <P>“Oh, really now.” The
    doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperation slip through.
    “There's nothing else for it. If you'd
    come to me when it all started, well, we might've had
    other options. You've got no one to blame but
    yourself.”</P>
    <P>“No,” I repeated.
    “Not now. I won't sign.”</P>
    <P>Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but
    the restraints and his grip held me fast. “You've
    got to do it, Julius. It's for the best,” he said.</P>
    <P>“I'm not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth. His fingertips were callused,
    worked rough with exertion well beyond the normal call of duty.</P>
    <P>“No one's killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knew how old he was? He
    could be 18 for all I knew. “It's just the
    opposite: we're saving you. If you continue like this,
    it will only get worse. The seizures, mental breakdown, the whole
    melon going soft. You don't want that.”</P>
    <P>I thought of Zed's spectacular transformation into a
    crazy person. <EM>No, I sure don't</EM>. “I
    don't care about the interface. Chop it out. I can't
    do it now.” I swallowed. “Later.
    After the rehab. Eight more weeks.”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of
    the room and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his
    gorge work as he subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to
    wait.</P>
    <P>No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may
    have been ten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I
    didn't know it until urgent necessity made the discovery
    for me.</P>
    <P>When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly
    recognized: a HERF gun.</P>
    <P>Oh, it wasn't the same model I'd used on
    the Hall of Presidents. This one was smaller, and better made, with
    the precise engineering of a surgical tool. The doc raised his
    eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,” he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, <EM>he
    knows, he knows, the Hall of Presidents</EM>. But he didn't
    know. That episode was locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup.</P>
    <P>“I know,” I said.</P>
    <P>“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will
    penetrate the interface's shielding and fuse it. It
    probably won't turn you into a vegetable. That's
    the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your last
    backup. You have to sign the consent before I use it.” He'd dropped all kindly pretense from his voice,
    not bothering to disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the
    miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all but obsoleted
    the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you can grow a
    clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Some people swapped
    corpuses just to get rid of a cold.</P>
    <P>I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the
    utilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the
    Imagineering compound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage.
    Of course: using the HERF on me would kill any electronics in the
    neighborhood. They had to shield me before they pulled the trigger.</P>
    <P>The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. He
    sealed the cage and retreated to the lab's door. He
    pulled a heavy apron and helmet with faceguard from a hook beside
    the door.</P>
    <P>“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and
    pull the trigger. I'll come back in five minutes. Once I
    am in the room, place the gun on the floor and do not touch it. It
    is only good for a single usage, but I have no desire to find out
    I'm wrong.”</P>
    <P>He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy,
    dense with its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better
    focus its cone.</P>
    <P>I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb
    found the trigger-stud.</P>
    <P>I paused. This wouldn't kill me, but it might lock
    the interface forever, paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing
    maniac. I knew that I would never be able to pull the trigger. The
    doc must've known, too—this was his way of
    convincing me to let him do that restore.</P>
    <P>I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was
    “Waaagh!”</P>
    <P>The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud,
    and there was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped.</P>
    <P>I had no more interface.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on the
    gurney, rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tool
    and pointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital
    microcircuitry in it dead. For the first time since my twenties, I
    was no more advanced than nature had made me.</P>
    <P>The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where
    I'd thrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday
    cage and the lab under my own power, but just barely, my muscles
    groaning from the inadvertent isometric exercises of my seizure.</P>
    <P>Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the
    wall. The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand
    catching the doc's in a lightning-quick reflex. It was
    easy to forget Dan's old line of work here in the Magic
    Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the doc's arm and
    sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. My old pal,
    the action hero.</P>
    <P>Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my
    physical state and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit,
    supporting me. I didn't have the strength to stop him. I
    needed sleep.</P>
    <P>“I'm taking you home,” he said. “We'll fight Debra off
    tomorrow.”</P>
    <P>“Sure,” I said, and
    boarded the waiting tram.</P>
    <P>But we didn't go home. Dan took me back to my hotel,
    the Contemporary, and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the
    lock and stood awkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was
    my new home, as I collapsed into the bed that was mine now.</P>
    <P>With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house
    we'd shared.</P>
    <P>I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me,
    and added a mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to
    control my “personality swings.” In seconds, I was asleep.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch7" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 7</H1>
    <P>The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting
    the rehab on the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding
    around the facade, though no real work would be done on it—we
    wanted the appearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an idea.</P>
    <P>I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary,
    handling my calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the
    first grumblings as the Disney-going public realized that the
    Mansion was being taken down for a full-blown rehab. We didn't
    exchange any unnecessary words, standing side by side without ever
    looking into one another's eyes. I couldn't
    really feel awkward around Dan, anyway. He never let me, and besides
    we had our hands full directing disappointed guests away from the
    Mansion. A depressing number of them headed straight for the Hall of
    Presidents.</P>
    <P>We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked
    screed about the Mansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD:
    “Hey! Anyone hear anything about scheduled maintenance at
    the HM? I just buzzed by on the way to the new H of P's
    and it looks like some big stuff's afoot—scaffolding,
    castmembers swarming in and out, see the pic. I hope they're
    not screwing up a good thing. BTW, don't miss the new H
    of P's—very Bitchun.”</P>
    <P>“Right,” I said.
    “Who's the author, and is he on the list?”</P>
    <P>Dan cogitated a moment. “<EM>She</EM> is Kim Wright,
    and she's on the list. Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion
    fanac, big readership.”</P>
    <P>“Call her,” I said.</P>
    <P>This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em
    in costume, and put 'em up on the scaffolds. Give them
    outsized, bat-adorned tools and get them to play at construction
    activity in thumpy, undead pantomime. In time, Suneep and his gang
    would have a batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we'd
    move to them, get them wandering the queue area, interacting with
    curious guests. The new Mansion would be open for business in 48
    hours, albeit in stripped-down fashion. The scaffolding made for a
    nice weenie, a visual draw that would pull the hordes that thronged
    Debra's Hall of Presidents over for a curious peek or
    two. Buzz city.</P>
    <P>I'm a pretty smart guy.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking
    the Pirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person
    for the job: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra
    and her crew had performed. If I'd had more time, I
    would've run a deep background check on every one of the
    names on my list, but that would've taken months.</P>
    <P>Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to
    my handicap, before coming to the point. “We read your
    post about the Mansion's rehab. You're the
    first one to notice it, and we wondered if you'd be
    interested in coming by to find out a little more about our
    plans.”</P>
    <P>Dan winced. “She's a screamer,” he whispered.</P>
    <P>Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the
    Mansion fans we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd
    done that a dozen times that morning, and there was no end in sight.
    I couldn't seem to get lathered up about it, though, nor
    about anything else, not even the hickey just visible under Dan's
    collar. The transdermal mood-balancer on my bicep was seeing to
    that—doctor's orders.</P>
    <P>“Fine, fine. We're standing by the Pet
    Cemetery, two cast members, male, in Mansion costumes. About
    five-ten, apparent 30. You can't miss us.”</P>
    <P>She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited,
    jogging. She was apparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old,
    in a hipster climate-control cowl that clung to and released her
    limbs, which were long and double-kneed. All the rage among the
    younger set, including the girl who'd shot me.</P>
    <P>But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body.
    She wasn't wearing a designer face, rather one that had
    enough imperfections to be the one she was born with, eyes set close
    and nose wide and slightly squashed.</P>
    <P>I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but
    without jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over here.”</P>
    <P>She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging
    full-bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she
    didn't brush against a single soul. When she reached us,
    she came up short and bounced a little. “Hi, I'm
    Kim!” she said, pumping my arm with
    the peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. “Julius,” I said, then waited while she repeated the process with Dan.</P>
    <P>“So,” she said,
    “what's the deal?”</P>
    <P>I took her hand. “Kim, we've got a job for
    you, if you're interested.”</P>
    <P>She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. “I'll
    take it!” she said.</P>
    <P>I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of
    laugh, but underneath it was relief. “I think I'd
    better explain it to you first,” I
    said.</P>
    <P>“Explain away!” she
    said, and gave my hand another squeeze.</P>
    <P>I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the
    rehab plans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim
    drank it all in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it
    down, eyes wide. It was disconcerting, and I finally asked, “Are
    you recording this?”</P>
    <P>Kim blushed. “I hope that's okay! I'm
    starting a new Mansion scrapbook. I have one for every ride in the
    Park, but this one's gonna be a world-beater!”</P>
    <P>Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing
    ad-hoc business was tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn't
    occurred to me that the new castmembers we brought in would want to
    record every little detail and push it out over the Net as a big old
    Whuffie collector.</P>
    <P>“I can switch it off,” Kim
    said. She looked worried, and I really started to grasp how
    important the Mansion was to the people we were recruiting, how much
    of a privilege we were offering them.</P>
    <P>“Leave it rolling,” I
    said. “Let's show the world how it's
    done.”</P>
    <P>We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was
    half-naked by the time we got there, literally tearing off her
    clothes in anticipation of getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty
    Square ad-hoc that we'd stashed at costuming, already
    had clothes waiting for her, a rotting maid's uniform
    with an oversized toolbelt.</P>
    <P>We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a
    water-based cement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and
    moving to a new spot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe
    that we'd have to tear her away when the time came.</P>
    <P>We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new
    castmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows,
    singing “Grim Grinning Ghosts” and generally having a high old time.</P>
    <P>“This'll do,” I
    said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, and the
    transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my
    bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through
    my mood. I needed to get offstage.</P>
    <P>Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he
    whispered in my ear, “This was a great idea, Julius.
    Really.”</P>
    <P>We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with
    pride. Suneep had three of his assistants working on the first
    generation of mobile telepresence robots for the exterior, and had
    promised a prototype for that afternoon. The robots were easy
    enough—just off-the-shelf stuff, really—but
    the costumes and kinematics routines were something else. Thinking
    about what he and Suneep's gang of hypercreative
    super-geniuses would come up with cheered me up a little, as did
    being out of the public eye.</P>
    <P>Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a
    tornado. Imagineer packs rolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or
    formed tight argumentative knots in the corners as they shouted over
    whatever their HUDs were displaying. In the middle of it all was
    Suneep, who looked like he was barely restraining an urge to shout
    Yippee! He was clearly in his element.</P>
    <P>He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw
    them wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. “What
    wonderful flumgubbery!” he shouted,
    over the noise.</P>
    <P>“Sure is,” I agreed.
    “How's the prototype coming?”</P>
    <P>Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities
    in the air. “In due time, in due time. I've
    put that team onto something else, a kinematics routine for a class
    of flying spooks that use gasbags to stay aloft—silent
    and scary. It's old spy-tech, and the retrofit's
    coming tremendously. Take a look!” He
    pointed a finger at me and, presumably, squirted some data my way.</P>
    <P>“I'm offline,” I
    reminded him gently.</P>
    <P>He slapped his forehead, took a moment to push his hair off his
    face, and gave me an apologetic wave. “Of course, of
    course. Here.” He unrolled an LCD
    and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on the screen,
    rendered against the ballroom scene. They were thematically
    consistent with the existing Mansion ghosts, more funny than scary,
    and their faces were familiar. I looked around the lab and realized
    that they'd caricatured various Imagineers.</P>
    <P>“Ah! You noticed,” Suneep
    said, rubbing his hands together. “A very good joke,
    yes?”</P>
    <P>“This is terrific,” I
    said, carefully. “But I really need some robots up and
    running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?” Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited
    to fans like Kim, who lived in the area. I had broader designs than
    that.</P>
    <P>Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed
    it. I don't like to stop my people when they have good
    ideas, but there's a time and a place. I'll
    put them on it right away. Leave it to me.”</P>
    <P>Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil.
    Of course. She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out
    for Dan's hand, saw me, and changed her mind.</P>
    <P>“Hi, guys,” she said,
    with studied casualness.</P>
    <P>“Oh, hello!” said
    Suneep. He fired his finger at her—the flying ghosts, I
    imagined. Lil's eyes rolled up for a moment, then she
    nodded exhaustedly at him.</P>
    <P>“Very good,” she
    said. “I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoor crews
    are on-schedule. They've got most of the animatronics
    dismantled, and they're taking down the glass in the
    Ballroom now.” The Ballroom ghost
    effects were accomplished by means of a giant pane of polished glass
    that laterally bisected the room. The Mansion had been built around
    it—it was too big to take out in one piece. “They
    say it'll be a couple days before they've
    got it cut up and ready to remove.”</P>
    <P>A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of
    the Imagineers rushing in to fill it.</P>
    <P>“You must be exhausted,” Dan
    said, at length.</P>
    <P>“Goddamn right,” I
    said, at the same moment that Lil said, “I guess I am.”</P>
    <P>We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil's
    and my shoulders and squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of
    industrial lubricant, ozone, and fatigue poisons.</P>
    <P>“You two should go home and give each other a
    massage,” he said. “You've
    earned some rest.”</P>
    <P>Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out
    from under Suneep's arm and thanked him quietly, then
    slunk off to the Contemporary for a hot tub and a couple hours of
    sleep.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I came back to the Mansion at sundown. It was cool enough that I
    took a surface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of
    riding through the clattering, air-conditioned comfort of the
    utilidors.</P>
    <P>As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving
    for <EM>real</EM> weather, the kind of climate I'd grown
    up with in Toronto. It was October, for chrissakes, and a lifetime
    of conditioning told me that it was May. I stopped and leaned on a
    bench for a moment and closed my eyes. Unbidden, and with the
    clarity of a HUD, I saw High Park in Toronto, clothed in its autumn
    colors, fiery reds and oranges, shades of evergreen and earthy
    brown. God, I needed a vacation.</P>
    <P>I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the
    Hall of Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it,
    one that stretched back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and
    sucked air between my teeth: they had enough people for five or six
    full houses waiting here—easily an hour's
    wait. The Hall <EM>never</EM> drew crowds like this. Debra was
    working the turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she caught my eye
    and snapped a nod at me.</P>
    <P>I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new
    recruits had formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning their
    way through “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” with a new call-and-response structure. A small audience
    participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding.</P>
    <P>“Well, at least that's going right,” I muttered to myself. And it was, except that I could see
    members of the ad-hoc looking on from the sidelines, and the looks
    weren't kindly. Totally obsessive fans are a good
    measure of a ride's popularity, but they're
    kind of a pain in the ass, too. They lipsynch the soundtrack, cadge
    souvenirs and pester you with smarmy, show-off questions. After a
    while, even the cheeriest castmember starts to lose patience,
    develop an automatic distaste for them.</P>
    <P>The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion had
    been railroaded into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on
    it, and were now forced to endure the company of these grandstanding
    megafans. If I'd been there when it all
    started—instead of sleeping!—I may've
    been able to massage their bruised egos, but now I wondered if it
    was too late.</P>
    <P>Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed
    into my costume and went back onstage. I joined the
    call-and-response enthusiastically, walking around to the ad-hocs
    and getting them to join in, reluctantly or otherwise.</P>
    <P>By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of
    ad-hocs were ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits
    to an offstage break-room.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Suneep didn't deliver the robot prototypes for a
    week, and told me that it would be another week before I could have
    even five production units. Though he didn't say it, I
    got the sense that his guys were out of control, so excited by the
    freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they were running wild. Suneep
    himself was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. I didn't
    press it.</P>
    <P>Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were
    multiplying. I was staying on top of the fan response to the rehab
    from a terminal I'd had installed in my hotel room. Kim
    and her local colleagues were fielding millions of hits every day,
    their Whuffie accumulating as envious fans around the world logged
    in to watch their progress on the scaffolding.</P>
    <P>That was all according to plan. What wasn't according
    to plan was that the new recruits were doing their own recruiting,
    extending invitations to their net-pals to come on down to Florida,
    bunk on their sofas and guest-beds, and present themselves to me for
    active duty.</P>
    <P>The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room.
    Her gorge was working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the
    middle distance. No doubt she was penning yet another breathless
    missive about the magic of working in the Mansion. “Hey,
    there,” I said. “Have
    you got a minute to meet with me?”</P>
    <P>She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a
    bright smile.</P>
    <P>“Hi, Julius!” she
    said. “Sure!”</P>
    <P>“Why don't you change into civvies,
    we'll take a walk through the Park and talk?”</P>
    <P>Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I'd been
    quite firm about her turning it in to the laundry every night
    instead of wearing it home.</P>
    <P>Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her
    cowl. We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked
    through the late-afternoon rush of children and their adults, queued
    deep and thick for Snow White, Dumbo and Peter Pan.</P>
    <P>“How're you liking it here?” I asked.</P>
    <P>Kim gave a little bounce. “Oh, Julius, it's
    the best time of my life, really! A dream come true. I'm
    meeting so many interesting people, and I'm really
    feeling creative. I can't wait to try out the
    telepresence rigs, too.”</P>
    <P>“Well, I'm really pleased with what you
    and your friends are up to here. You're working hard,
    putting on a good show. I like the songs you've been
    working up, too.”</P>
    <P>She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of
    any number of action vids those days and she was suddenly standing
    in front of me, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She
    looked serious.</P>
    <P>“Is there a problem, Julius? If there is, I'd
    rather we just talked about it, instead of making chitchat.”</P>
    <P>I smiled and took her hand off my shoulder. “How old
    are you, Kim?”</P>
    <P>“Nineteen,” she said.
    “What's the problem?”</P>
    <P>Nineteen! Jesus, no wonder she was so volatile. <EM>What's
    my excuse, then?</EM></P>
    <P>“It's not a problem, Kim, it's
    just something I wanted to discuss with you. The people you-all have
    been bringing down to work for me, they're all really
    great castmembers.”</P>
    <P>“But?”</P>
    <P>“But we have limited resources around here. Not enough
    hours in the day for me to stay on top of the new folks, the rehab,
    everything. Not to mention that until we open the new Mansion,
    there's a limited number of extras we can use out front.
    I'm concerned that we're going to put
    someone on stage without proper training, or that we're
    going to run out of uniforms; I'm also concerned about
    people coming all the way here and discovering that there aren't
    any shifts for them to take.”</P>
    <P>She gave me a relieved look. “Is <EM>that</EM> all?
    Don't worry about it. I've been talking to
    Debra, over at the Hall of Presidents, and she says she can pick up
    any people who can't be used at the Mansion—we
    could even rotate back and forth!” She
    was clearly proud of her foresight.</P>
    <P>My ears buzzed. Debra, one step ahead of me all along the way.
    She probably suggested that Kim do some extra recruiting in the
    first place. She'd take in the people who came down to
    work the Mansion, convince them they'd been hard done by
    the Liberty Square crew, and rope them into her little Whuffie
    ranch, the better to seize the Mansion, the Park, the whole of Walt
    Disney World.</P>
    <P>“Oh, I don't think it'll come
    to that,” I said, carefully.
    “I'm sure we can find a use for them all at
    the Mansion. More the merrier.”</P>
    <P>Kim cocked quizzical, but let it go. I bit my tongue. The pain
    brought me back to reality, and I started planning costume
    production, training rosters, bunking. God, if only Suneep would
    finish the robots!</P>
    <HR>
    <P>“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I said, hotly.</P>
    <P>Lil folded her arms and glared. “No, Julius. It
    won't fly. The group is already upset that all the glory
    is going to the new people, they'll never let us bring
    more in. They also won't stop working on the rehab to
    train them, costume them, feed them and mother them. They're
    losing Whuffie every day that the Mansion's shut up, and
    they don't want any more delays. Dave's
    already joined up with Debra, and I'm sure he's
    not the last one.”</P>
    <P>Dave—the jerk who'd pissed all over the
    rehab in the meeting. Of course he'd gone over. Lil and
    Dan stood side by side on the porch of the house where I'd
    lived. I'd driven out that night to convince Lil to sell
    the ad-hocs on bringing in more recruits, but it wasn't
    going according to plan. They wouldn't even let me in
    the house.</P>
    <P>“So what do I tell Kim?”</P>
    <P>“Tell her whatever you want,” Lil said. “You brought her in—you
    manage her. Take some goddamn responsibility for once in your
    life.”</P>
    <P>It wasn't going to get any better. Dan gave me an
    apologetic look. Lil glared a moment longer, then went into the
    house.</P>
    <P>“Debra's doing real well,” he said. “The net's all over her.
    Biggest thing ever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance
    mixes with the DJ's backup being shoved in bursts into
    the dancers.”</P>
    <P>“God,” I said. “I
    fucked up, Dan. I fucked it all up.”</P>
    <P>He didn't say anything, and that was the same as
    agreeing.</P>
    <P>Driving back to the hotel, I decided I needed to talk to Kim. She
    was a problem I didn't need, and maybe a problem I could
    solve. I pulled a screeching U-turn and drove the little runabout to
    her place, a tiny condo in a crumbling complex that had once been a
    gated seniors' village, pre-Bitchun.</P>
    <P>Her place was easy to spot. All the lights were burning, faint
    conversation audible through the screen door. I jogged up the steps
    two at a time, and was about to knock when a familiar voice drifted
    through the screen.</P>
    <P>Debra, saying: “Oh yes, oh yes! Terrific idea! I'd
    never really thought about using streetmosphere players to liven up
    the queue area, but you're making a lot of sense. You
    people have just been doing the <EM>best</EM> work over at the
    Mansion—find me more like you and I'll take
    them for the Hall any day!”</P>
    <P>I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly.
    The anger and fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly
    light and cool and ready to do something terrible.</P>
    <P>I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Some people never learn. I'm one of them, apparently.</P>
    <P>I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I
    slipped in through the cast entrance using the ID card I'd
    scored when my systems went offline and I was no longer able to
    squirt my authorization at the door.</P>
    <P>I changed clothes in a bathroom on Main Street, switching into a
    black cowl that completely obscured my features, then slunk through
    the shadows along the storefronts until I came to the moat around
    Cinderella's castle. Keeping low, I stepped over the
    fence and duck-walked down the embankment, then slipped into the
    water and sloshed across to the Adventureland side.</P>
    <P>Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself
    in doorways whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the
    distance, until I reached the Hall of Presidents, and in a twinkling
    I was inside the theater itself.</P>
    <P>Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking bar
    from my cowl's tabbed pocket and set to work.</P>
    <P>The primary broadcast units were hidden behind a painted scrim
    over the stage, and they were surprisingly well built for a first
    generation tech. I really worked up a sweat smashing them, but I
    kept at it until not a single component remained recognizable. The
    work was slow and loud in the silent Park, but it lulled me into a
    sleepy reverie, an autohypnotic swing-bang-swing-bang timeless time.
    To be on the safe side, I grabbed the storage units and slipped them
    into the cowl.</P>
    <P>Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of
    hanging out at the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the
    animatronics helped me. I methodically investigated every nook,
    cranny and storage area until I located them, in what had been a
    break-room closet. By now, I had the rhythm of the thing, and I made
    short work of them.</P>
    <P>I did one more pass, wrecking anything that looked like it might
    be a prototype for the next generation or notes that would help them
    reconstruct the units I'd smashed.</P>
    <P>I had no illusions about Debra's
    preparedness—she'd have something offsite
    that she could get up and running in a few days. I wasn't
    doing anything permanent, I was just buying myself a day or two.</P>
    <P>I made my way clean out of the Park without being spotted, and
    sloshed my way into my runabout, shoes leaking water from the moat.</P>
    <P>For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Of course, I got caught. I don't really have the
    temperament for Machiavellian shenanigans, and I left a trail a mile
    wide, from the muddy footprints in the Contemporary's
    lobby to the wrecking bar thoughtlessly left behind, with my cowl
    and the storage units from the Hall, forgotten on the back seat of
    my runabout.</P>
    <P>I whistled my personal jazzy uptempo version of “Grim
    Grinning Ghosts” as I made my way
    from Costuming, through the utilidor, out to Liberty Square, a few
    minutes before the Park opened.</P>
    <P>Standing in front of me were Lil and Debra. Debra was holding my
    cowl and wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units.</P>
    <P>I hadn't put on my transdermals that morning, and so
    the emotion I felt was unmuffled, loud and yammering.</P>
    <P>I ran.</P>
    <P>I ran past them, along the road to Adventureland, past the Tiki
    Room where I'd been killed, past the Adventureland gate
    where I'd waded through the moat, down Main Street. I
    ran and ran, elbowing early guests, trampling flowers, knocking over
    an apple cart across from the Penny Arcade.</P>
    <P>I ran until I reached the main gate, and turned, thinking I'd
    outrun Lil and Debra and all my problems. I'd thought
    wrong. They were both there, a step behind me, puffing and red.
    Debra held my wrecking bar like a weapon, and she brandished it at
    me.</P>
    <P>“You're a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we'd been alone, she
    would've swung it at me.</P>
    <P>“Can't take it when someone else plays
    rough, huh, Debra?” I sneered.</P>
    <P>Lil shook her head disgustedly. “She's
    right, you are an idiot. The ad-hoc's meeting in
    Adventureland. You're coming.”</P>
    <P>“Why?” I asked,
    feeling belligerent. “You going to honor me for all my
    hard work?”</P>
    <P>“We're going to talk about the future,
    Julius, what's left of it for us.”</P>
    <P>“For God's sake, Lil, can't
    you see what's going on? They <EM>killed</EM> me! They
    did it, and now we're fighting each other instead of
    her! Why can't you see how <EM>wrong</EM> that is?”</P>
    <P>“You'd better watch those accusations,
    Julius,” Debra said, quietly and
    intensely, almost hissing. “I don't know who
    killed you or why, but you're the one who's
    guilty here. You need help.”</P>
    <P>I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into
    the now-open Park, and several of them were watching intently as the
    three costumed castmembers shouted at each other. I could feel my
    Whuffie hemorrhaging. “Debra, you are purely full of
    shit, and your work is trite and unimaginative. You're a
    fucking despoiler and you don't even have the guts to
    admit it.”</P>
    <P>“That's <EM>enough</EM>, Julius,” Lil said, her face hard, her rage barely in check. “We're
    going.”</P>
    <P>Debra walked a pace behind me, Lil a pace before, all the way
    through the crowd to Adventureland. I saw a dozen opportunities to
    slip into a gap in the human ebb and flow and escape custody, but I
    didn't try. I wanted a chance to tell the whole world
    what I'd done and why I'd done it.</P>
    <P>Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meeting
    room. Lil turned. “I don't think you should
    be here, Debra,” she said in
    measured tones.</P>
    <P>Debra shook her head. “You can't keep me
    out, you know. And you shouldn't want to. We're
    on the same side.”</P>
    <P>I snorted derisively, and I think it decided Lil. “Come
    on, then,” she said.</P>
    <P>It was SRO in the meeting room, packed to the gills with the
    entire ad-hoc, except for my new recruits. No work was being done on
    the rehab, then, and the Liberty Belle would be sitting at her dock.
    Even the restaurant crews were there. Liberty Square must've
    been a ghost town. It gave the meeting a sense of urgency: the
    knowledge that there were guests in Liberty Square wandering
    aimlessly, looking for castmembers to help them out. Of course,
    Debra's crew might've been around.</P>
    <P>The crowd's faces were hard and bitter, leaving no
    doubt in my mind that I was in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the
    front row, looked angry. I nearly started crying right then.
    Dan—oh, Dan. My pal, my confidant, my patsy, my rival,
    my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him to death and hug him
    at the same time.</P>
    <P>Lil took the podium and tucked stray hairs behind her ears.
    “All right, then,” she
    said. I stood to her left and Debra stood to her right.</P>
    <P>“Thanks for coming out today. I'd like to
    get this done quickly. We all have important work to get to. I'll
    run down the facts: last night, a member of this ad-hoc vandalized
    the Hall of Presidents, rendering it useless. It's
    estimated that it will take at least a week to get it back up and
    running.</P>
    <P>“I don't have to tell you that this
    isn't acceptable. This has never happened before, and it
    will never happen again. We're going to see to that.</P>
    <P>“I'd like to propose that no further work
    be done on the Mansion until the Hall of Presidents is fully
    operational. I will be volunteering my services on the repairs.”</P>
    <P>There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn't be the
    only one working at the Hall that week. “Disney World
    isn't a competition,” Lil
    said. “All the different ad-hocs work together, and we do
    it to make the Park as good as we can. We lose sight of that at our
    peril.”</P>
    <P>I nearly gagged on bile. “I'd like to say
    something,” I said, as calmly as I
    could manage.</P>
    <P>Lil shot me a look. “That's fine, Julius.
    Any member of the ad-hoc can speak.”</P>
    <P>I took a deep breath. “I did it, all right?” I said. My voice cracked. “I did it, and I don't
    have any excuse for having done it. It may not have been the
    smartest thing I've ever done, but I think you all
    should understand how I was driven to it.</P>
    <P>“We're not <EM>supposed</EM> to be in
    competition with one another here, but we all know that that's
    just a polite fiction. The truth is that there's real
    competition in the Park, and that the hardest players are the crew
    that rehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They <EM>stole</EM> the Hall
    from you! They did it while you were distracted, they used <EM>me</EM>
    to engineer the distraction, they <EM>murdered</EM> me!” I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but I couldn't
    do anything about it.</P>
    <P>“Usually, the lie that we're all on the
    same side is fine. It lets us work together in peace. But that
    changed the day they had me shot. If you keep on believing it,
    you're going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom
    Sawyer Island—all of it. All the history we have with
    this place—all the history that the billions who've
    visited it have—it's going to be destroyed
    and replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that's
    taken over the Hall. Once that happens, there's nothing
    left that makes this place special. Anyone can get the same
    experience sitting at home on the sofa! What happens then, huh? How
    much longer do you think this place will stay open once the only
    people here are <EM>you?</EM>”</P>
    <P>Debra smiled condescendingly. “Are you finished,
    then?” she asked, sweetly. “Fine.
    I know I'm not a member of this group, but since it was
    my work that was destroyed last night, I think I would like to
    address Julius's statements, if you don't
    mind.” She paused, but no one spoke
    up.</P>
    <P>“First of all, I want you all to know that we don't
    hold you responsible for what happened last night. We know who was
    responsible, and he needs help. I urge you to see to it that he gets
    it.</P>
    <P>“Next, I'd like to say that as far as
    I'm concerned, we are on the same side—the
    side of the Park. This is a special place, and it couldn't
    exist without all of our contributions. What happened to Julius was
    terrible, and I sincerely hope that the person responsible is caught
    and brought to justice. But that person wasn't me or any
    of the people in my ad-hoc.</P>
    <P>“Lil, I'd like to thank you for your
    generous offer of assistance, and we'll take you up on
    it. That goes for all of you—come on by the Hall,
    we'll put you to work. We'll be up and
    running in no time.</P>
    <P>“Now, as far as the Mansion goes, let me say this once
    and for all: neither me nor my ad-hoc have any desire to take over
    the operations of the Mansion. It is a terrific attraction, and
    it's getting better with the work you're all
    doing. If you've been worrying about it, then you can
    stop worrying now. We're all on the same side.</P>
    <P>“Thanks for hearing me out. I've got to go
    see my team now.”</P>
    <P>She turned and left, a chorus of applause following her out.</P>
    <P>Lil waited until it died down, then said, “All right,
    then, we've got work to do, too. I'd like to
    ask you all a favor, first. I'd like us to keep the
    details of last night's incident to ourselves. Letting
    the guests and the world know about this ugly business isn't
    good for anyone. Can we all agree to do that?”</P>
    <P>There was a moment's pause while the results were
    tabulated on the HUDs, then Lil gave them a million-dollar smile.
    “I knew you'd come through. Thanks, guys.
    Let's get to work.”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I spent the day at the hotel, listlessly scrolling around on my
    terminal. Lil had made it very clear to me after the meeting that I
    wasn't to show my face inside the Park until I'd
    “gotten help,” whatever
    that meant.</P>
    <P>By noon, the news was out. It was hard to pin down the exact
    source, but it seemed to revolve around the new recruits. One of
    them had told their net-pals about the high drama in Liberty Square,
    and mentioned my name.</P>
    <P>There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected
    more. I needed some kind of help, that was for sure.</P>
    <P>I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole
    business and leaving Walt Disney World to start yet another new
    life, Whuffie-poor and fancy-free.</P>
    <P>It wouldn't be so bad. I'd been in poor
    repute before, not so long ago. That first time Dan and I had palled
    around, back at the U of T, I'd been the center of a lot
    of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and Whuffie-poor as a man can be.</P>
    <P>I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate
    controlled. It was cramped and dull, but my access to the network
    was free and I had plenty of material to entertain myself. While I
    couldn't get a table in a restaurant, I was free to
    queue up at any of the makers around town and get myself whatever I
    wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it. Compared to 99.99999
    percent of all the people who'd ever lived, I had a life
    of unparalleled luxury.</P>
    <P>Even by the standards of the Bitchun Society, I was hardly a
    rarity. The number of low-esteem individuals at large was
    significant, and they got along just fine, hanging out in parks,
    arguing, reading, staging plays, playing music.</P>
    <P>Of course, that wasn't the life for me. I had Dan to
    pal around with, a rare high-net-Whuffie individual who was willing
    to fraternize with a shmuck like me. He'd stand me to
    meals at sidewalk cafes and concerts at the SkyDome, and shoot down
    any snotty reputation-punk who sneered at my Whuffie tally. Being
    with Dan was a process of constantly reevaluating my beliefs in the
    Bitchun Society, and I'd never had a more vibrant,
    thought-provoking time in all my life.</P>
    <P>I could have left the Park, deadheaded to anywhere in the world,
    started over. I could have turned my back on Dan, on Debra, on Lil
    and the whole mess.</P>
    <P>I didn't.</P>
    <P>I called up the doc.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch8" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 8</H1>
    <P>Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the
    background, I heard a chorus of crying children, the constant
    backdrop of the Magic Kingdom infirmary.</P>
    <P>“Hi, doc,” I said.</P>
    <P>“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of professional medical and castmember
    friendliness, I sensed irritation.</P>
    <P><EM>Make it all good again</EM>. “I'm not
    really sure. I wanted to see if I could talk it over with you. I'm
    having some pretty big problems.”</P>
    <P>“I'm on-shift until five. Can it wait
    until then?”</P>
    <P>By then, I had no idea if I'd have the nerve to see
    him. “I don't think so—I was
    hoping we could meet right away.”</P>
    <P>“If it's an emergency, I can have an
    ambulance sent for you.”</P>
    <P>“It's urgent, but not an emergency. I need
    to talk about it in person. Please?”</P>
    <P>He sighed in undoctorly, uncastmemberly fashion. “Julius,
    I've got important things to do here. Are you sure this
    can't wait?”</P>
    <P>I bit back a sob. “I'm sure, doc.”</P>
    <P>“All right then. When can you be here?”</P>
    <P>Lil had made it clear that she didn't want me in the
    Park. “Can you meet me? I can't really come
    to you. I'm at the Contemporary, Tower B, room 2334.”</P>
    <P>“I don't really make house calls, son.”</P>
    <P>“I know, I know.” I
    hated how pathetic I sounded. “Can you make an exception?
    I don't know who else to turn to.”</P>
    <P>“I'll be there as soon as I can. I'll
    have to get someone to cover for me. Let's not make a
    habit of this, all right?”</P>
    <P>I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.”</P>
    <P>He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan.</P>
    <P>“Yes?” he said,
    cautiously.</P>
    <P>“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don't
    know if he can help me—I don't know if
    anyone can. I just wanted you to know.”</P>
    <P>He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still my
    friend, even after everything. “Do you want me to come
    over?”</P>
    <P>“That would be very nice,” I
    said, quietly. “I'm at the hotel.”</P>
    <P>“Give me ten minutes,” he
    said, and rang off.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks
    of Space Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the
    Seven Seas Lagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile
    after manicured mile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of
    happy laughter drifted with the wind, and the flowers were in bloom.
    In Toronto, it would be freezing rain, gray buildings, noisome rapid
    transit (a monorail hissed by), and hard-faced anonymity. I missed
    it.</P>
    <P>Dan pulled up a chair next to mine and sat without a word. We
    both stared out at the view for a long while.</P>
    <P>“It's something else, isn't
    it?” I said, finally.</P>
    <P>“I suppose so,” he
    said. “I want to say something before the doc comes by,
    Julius.”</P>
    <P>“Go ahead.”</P>
    <P>“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened
    in the first place, and I'm not proud of myself. If you
    two were breaking up, that's none of my business, but I
    had no right to hurry it along.”</P>
    <P>“All right,” I said.
    I was too drained for emotion.</P>
    <P>“I've taken a room here, moved my
    things.”</P>
    <P>“How's Lil taking it?”</P>
    <P>“Oh, she thinks I'm a total bastard. I
    suppose she's right.”</P>
    <P>“I suppose she's partly right,” I corrected him.</P>
    <P>He gave me a gentle slug in the shoulder. “Thanks.”</P>
    <P>We waited in companionable silence until the doc arrived.</P>
    <P>He bustled in, his smile lines drawn up into a sour purse and
    waited expectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on
    the bed.</P>
    <P>“I'm cracking up or something,” I said. “I've been acting erratically,
    sometimes violently. I don't know what's
    wrong with me.” I'd
    rehearsed the speech, but it still wasn't easy to choke
    out.</P>
    <P>“We both know what's wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently. “You need to be
    refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh clone and retire
    this one. We've had this talk.”</P>
    <P>“I can't do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just
    can't—isn't there another
    way?”</P>
    <P>The doc shook his head. “Julius, I've got
    limited resources to allocate. There's a perfectly good
    cure for what's ailing you, and if you won't
    take it, there's not much I can do for you.”</P>
    <P>“But what about meds?”</P>
    <P>“Your problem isn't a chemical imbalance,
    it's a mental defect. Your <EM>brain</EM> is <EM>broken</EM>,
    son. All that meds will do is mask the symptoms, while you get
    worse. I can't tell you what you want to hear,
    unfortunately. Now, If you're ready to take the cure, I
    can retire this clone immediately and get you restored into a new
    one in 48 hours.”</P>
    <P>“Isn't there another way? Please? You have
    to help me—I can't lose all this.” I couldn't admit my real reasons for being so
    attached to this singularly miserable chapter in my life, not even
    to myself.</P>
    <P>The doctor rose to go. “Look, Julius, you haven't
    got the Whuffie to make it worth anyone's time to
    research a solution to this problem, other than the one that we all
    know about. I can give you mood-suppressants, but that's
    not a permanent solution.”</P>
    <P>“Why not?”</P>
    <P>He boggled. “You <EM>can't</EM> just take
    dope for the rest of your life, son. Eventually, something will
    happen to this body—I see from your file that you're
    stroke-prone—and you're going to get
    refreshed from your backup. The longer you wait, the more traumatic
    it'll be. You're robbing from your future
    self for your selfish present.”</P>
    <P>It wasn't the first time the thought had crossed my
    mind. Every passing day made it harder to take the cure. To lie down
    and wake up friends with Dan, to wake up and be in love with Lil
    again. To wake up to a Mansion the way I remembered it, a Hall of
    Presidents where I could find Lil bent over with her head in a
    President's guts of an afternoon. To lie down and wake
    without disgrace, without knowing that my lover and my best friend
    would betray me, <EM>had</EM> betrayed me. 
    </P>
    <P>I just couldn't do it—not yet, anyway. 
    </P>
    <P>Dan—Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I
    restored myself from my old backup, I'd lose my last
    year with him. I'd lose <EM>his</EM> last year.</P>
    <P>“Let's table that, doc. I hear what
    you're saying, but there're complications. I
    guess I'll take the mood-suppressants for now.”</P>
    <P>He gave me a cold look. “I'll give you a
    scrip, then. I could've done that without coming out
    here. Please don't call me anymore.”</P>
    <P>I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn't
    understand it until he was gone and I told Dan what had happened.</P>
    <P>“Us old-timers, we're used to thinking of
    doctors as highly trained professionals—all that
    pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long internships, anatomy drills...
    Truth is, the average doc today gets more training in bedside manner
    than bioscience. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a
    technician, not an MD, not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with
    the kind of knowledge you're looking for is working as a
    historical researcher, not a doctor.</P>
    <P>“But that's not the illusion. The doc is
    supposed to be the authority on medical matters, even though he's
    only got one trick: restore from backup. You're
    reminding Pete of that, and he's not happy to have it
    happen.”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning
    myself on the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk
    Around the World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown
    Discovery Island, and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the
    evenings and it was like old times, running down the pros and cons
    of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch
    with a sweating pitcher of lemonade.</P>
    <P>On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld,
    a museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the
    Bitchun Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct
    systems, in a package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like
    part of a costume, like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin
    streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure.</P>
    <P>Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to
    participate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less
    efficiently than I once may've. I took it downstairs the
    next morning and drove to the Magic Kingdom's castmember
    lot.</P>
    <P>At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the
    Contemporary's parking lot, my runabout was gone. A
    quick check with the handheld revealed the worst: my Whuffie was low
    enough that someone had just gotten inside and driven away,
    realizing that they could make more popular use of it than I could.</P>
    <P>With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key
    through the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied <EM>bzzz</EM> and
    lit up, “Please see the front desk.” My room had been reassigned, too. I had the short end of the
    Whuffie stick.</P>
    <P>At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail
    platform, but the other people on the car were none too friendly to
    me, and no one offered me an inch more personal space than was
    necessary. I had hit bottom.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my
    name tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of
    my fellow castmembers in the utilidors.</P>
    <P>I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I could tell instantly that I was being
    humored.</P>
    <P>“Where are you?” I
    asked.</P>
    <P>“Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree.”</P>
    <P>In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged
    some Whuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she'd
    never come down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They
    were drawing from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and
    from people who'd read the popular accounts of their
    struggle against the forces of petty jealousy and sabotage—i.e.,
    me.</P>
    <P>I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed
    into the heavy green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the
    Square.</P>
    <P>I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the
    giant, lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for
    me, and patted the bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped,
    waiting for him to spill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me
    this morning—I could feel it hovering like storm clouds.</P>
    <P>He wouldn't talk though, not until we finished the
    coffee. Then he stood and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn't
    rope-drop yet, and there weren't any guests in the Park,
    which was all for the better, given what was coming next.</P>
    <P>“Have you taken a look at Debra's Whuffie
    lately?” he asked, finally, as we
    stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding.</P>
    <P>I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm.
    “Don't bother,” he
    said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra's
    gang is number one with a bullet. Ever since word got out about what
    happened to the Hall, they've been stacking it deep.
    They can do just about anything, Jules, and get away with it.”</P>
    <P>My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars.
    “So, what is it they've done, Dan?” I asked, already knowing the answer.</P>
    <P>Dan didn't have to respond, because at that moment,
    Tim emerged from the Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He
    had a thoughtful expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin
    grin and came over.</P>
    <P>“Hey guys!” he said.</P>
    <P>“Hi, Tim,” Dan said.
    I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.</P>
    <P>“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said.</P>
    <P>“I haven't told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why don't
    you run it down?”</P>
    <P>“Well, it's pretty radical, I have to
    admit. We've learned some stuff from the Hall that we
    wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted to capture some of
    the historical character of the ghost story.”</P>
    <P>I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm.
    “Really?” he asked
    innocently. “How do you plan on doing that?”</P>
    <P>“Well, we're keeping the telepresence
    robots—that's a honey of an idea,
    Julius—but we're giving each one an uplink
    so that it can flash-bake. We've got some high-Whuffie
    horror writers pulling together a series of narratives about the
    lives of each ghost: how they met their tragic ends, what they've
    done since, you know.</P>
    <P>“The way we've storyboarded it, the guests
    stream through the ride pretty much the way they do now, walking
    through the preshow and then getting into the ride-vehicles, the
    Doom Buggies. But here's the big change: we <EM>slow it
    all down</EM>. We trade off throughput for intensity, make it more
    of a premium product.</P>
    <P>“So you're a guest. From the queue to the
    unload zone, you're being chased by these ghosts, these
    telepresence robots, and they're really scary—I've
    got Suneep's concept artists going back to the drawing
    board, hitting basic research on stuff that'll just
    scare the guests silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on
    you—wham! Flash-bake! You get its whole grisly story in
    three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the time you've
    left, you've had ten or more ghost-contacts, and the
    next time you come back, it's all new ghosts with all
    new stories. The way that the Hall's drawing 'em,
    we're bound to be a hit.” He
    put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly proud
    of himself.</P>
    <P>When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd
    been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a
    winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big
    golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity,
    they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping
    out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we
    were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue
    sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally,
    we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do!
    We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean
    floor. Once was cute—compelling and inspirational,
    even—but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once
    Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to
    resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins
    of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun
    utopia.</P>
    <P>And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way
    through the Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake.</P>
    <P>“Tim,” I said,
    hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said that
    you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn't
    be trying to take it away from us. Didn't you say
    that?”</P>
    <P>Tim rocked back as if I'd slapped him and the blood
    drained from his face. “But we're not taking
    it away!” he said. “You
    <EM>invited</EM> us to help.”</P>
    <P>I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said.</P>
    <P>“Sure,” he said.</P>
    <P>“Yes,” Dan said.
    “Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debra
    yesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab
    and suggest any changes. She was good enough to agree, and they've
    come up with some great ideas.” I
    read between the lines: the newbies you invited in have gone over to
    the other side and we're going to lose everything
    because of them. I felt like shit.</P>
    <P>“Well, I stand corrected,” I
    said, carefully. Tim's grin came back and he clapped his
    hands together. <EM>He really loves the Mansion</EM>, I thought. <EM>He
    could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.</EM></P>
    <HR>
    <P>Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles
    and sped towards Suneep's lab, jangling our bells at the
    rushing castmembers. “They don't have the
    authority to invite Debra in,” I
    panted as we pedaled.</P>
    <P>“Says who?” Dan said.</P>
    <P>“It was part of the deal—they knew that
    they were probationary members right from the start. They weren't
    even allowed into the design meetings.”</P>
    <P>“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said.</P>
    <P>Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab. He had
    dark circles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He
    seemed to be holding himself erect with nothing more than raw anger.</P>
    <P>“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed that this project wouldn't
    change midway through. Now it has, and I've got other
    commitments that I'm going to have to cancel because
    this is going off-schedule.”</P>
    <P>I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep,
    believe me, I'm just as upset about this as you are. We
    don't like this one little bit.”</P>
    <P>He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do the rehab for you and
    you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I've been
    holding up my end of the bargain, but where the hell have you been?
    If they replan the rehab now, I'll <EM>have</EM> to go
    along with them. I can't just leave the Mansion
    half-done—they'll murder me.”</P>
    <P>The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we
    don't like the new rehab plan, and we're
    going to stop it. You can help. Just stonewall them—tell
    them they'll have to find other Imagineering support if
    they want to go through with it, that you're booked
    solid.”</P>
    <P>Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a
    minute approval. “Yeah,” he
    drawled. “That'll help all right. Just tell
    'em that they're welcome to make any changes
    they want to the plan, <EM>if</EM> they can find someone else to
    execute them.”</P>
    <P>Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they
    go and find someone else to do it, and that person gets all the
    credit for the work my team's done so far. I just flush
    my time down the toilet.”</P>
    <P>“It won't come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep saying no
    for a couple days, we'll do the rest.”</P>
    <P>Suneep looked doubtful.</P>
    <P>“I promise,” I said.</P>
    <P>Suneep ran his stubby fingers through his already crazed hair.
    “All right,” he said,
    morosely.</P>
    <P>Dan slapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>It should have worked. It almost did.</P>
    <P>I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Dan
    exhorted.</P>
    <P>“Look, you don't have to roll over for
    Debra and her people! This is <EM>your</EM> garden, and you've
    tended it responsibly for years. She's got no right to
    move in on you—you've got all the Whuffie
    you need to defend the place, if you all work together.”</P>
    <P>No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch
    were tough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air
    conditioning an hour before the meeting and closed up all the
    windows, so that the room was a kiln for hard-firing irritation into
    rage. I stood meekly in the back, as far as possible from Dan. He
    was working his magic on my behalf, and I was content to let him do
    his thing.</P>
    <P>When Lil had arrived, she'd sized up the situation
    with a sour expression: sit in the front, near Dan, or in the back,
    near me. She'd chosen the middle, and to concentrate on
    Dan I had to tear my eyes away from the sweat glistening on her
    long, pale neck.</P>
    <P>Dan stalked the aisles like a preacher, eyes blazing.
    “They're <EM>stealing</EM> your future!
    They're <EM>stealing</EM> your <EM>past</EM>! They claim
    they've got your support!”</P>
    <P>He lowered his tone. “I don't think
    that's true.” He
    grabbed a castmember by her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is
    it true?” he said so low it was
    almost a whisper.</P>
    <P>“No,” the castmember
    said.</P>
    <P>He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is
    it true?” he demanded, raising his
    voice, slightly.</P>
    <P>“No!” the castmember
    said, his voice unnaturally loud after the whispers. A nervous
    chuckle rippled through the crowd.</P>
    <P>“Is it true?” he
    said, striding to the podium, shouting now.</P>
    <P>“No!” the crowd
    roared.</P>
    <P>“NO!” he shouted
    back.</P>
    <P>“You don't <EM>have to</EM> roll over and
    take it! You can fight back, carry on with the plan, send them
    packing. They're only taking over because you're
    letting them. Are you going to let them?”</P>
    <P>“NO!”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of
    anything, they've done the arithmetic and ensured
    themselves that the ad-hoc they're displacing doesn't
    have a hope of fighting back.</P>
    <P>For the defenders, it's a simple decision: step down
    gracefully and salvage some reputation out of the thing—fighting
    back will surely burn away even that meager reward.</P>
    <P>No one benefits from fighting back—least of all the
    thing everyone's fighting over. For example:</P>
    <P>It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in
    not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was
    the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little
    unclear on the concept.</P>
    <P>Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad
    students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of
    the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the
    Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully
    pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of
    impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to
    realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University.</P>
    <P>At least, that's what the intense, heavyset woman who
    seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning
    mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled
    the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers,
    and they woke up in a hurry when the woman's strident
    harangue burst over their heads.</P>
    <P>I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on
    the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then
    there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage.
    They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and
    tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front
    of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and
    the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to
    her lapel.</P>
    <P>“Wakey wakey!” she
    called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn't
    on the lesson-plan.</P>
    <P>“Come on, heads up! This is <EM>not</EM> a drill. The
    University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new
    management. If you'll set your handhelds to
    ‘receive,’ we'll be beaming out
    new lesson-plans momentarily. If you've forgotten your
    handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I'm
    going to run it down for you right now, anyway.</P>
    <P>“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement
    for you. You'll probably hear this a couple times more
    today, in your other classes. It's worth repeating. Here
    goes:</P>
    <P>“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at
    this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the
    Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto
    Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is <EM>in charge</EM>. We promise
    high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies,
    post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite
    life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will
    be <EM>fun</EM>.”</P>
    <P>She taught the course like a pro—you could tell
    she'd been drilling her lecture for a while.
    Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered as the prof made a
    break for it and was restrained.</P>
    <P>At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on
    her every word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next
    class, the whole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started
    buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of “Can you believe
    it?” that followed us out the door
    and to our next encounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department.</P>
    <P>It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing
    Social Deviance, and we got the same drill there, the same stirring
    propaganda, the same comical sight of a tenured prof battering
    himself against a human wall of ad-hocs.</P>
    <P>Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us
    with mics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big
    thumbs-up and said, “Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence.</P>
    <P>The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the
    newscast as I brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of
    Sociology told a reporter that the ad-hocs' courses
    would not be credited, that they were a gang of thugs who were
    totally unqualified to teach. A counterpoint interview from a
    spokesperson for the ad-hocs established that all of the new
    lecturers had been writing course-plans and lecture notes for the
    profs they replaced for years, and that they'd also
    written most of their journal articles.</P>
    <P>The profs brought University security out to help them regain
    their lecterns, only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in
    homemade uniforms. University security got the message—anyone
    could be replaced—and stayed away.</P>
    <P>The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by
    grade-conscious brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs'
    classes wouldn't count towards their degrees. Fools like
    me alternated between the outdoor and indoor classes, not learning
    much of anything.</P>
    <P>No one did. The profs spent their course-times whoring for
    Whuffie, leading the seminars like encounter groups instead of
    lectures. The ad-hocs spent their time badmouthing the profs and
    tearing apart their coursework.</P>
    <P>At the end of the semester, everyone got a credit and the
    University Senate disbanded the Sociology program in favor of a
    distance-ed offering from Concordia in Montreal. Forty years later,
    the fight was settled forever. Once you took backup-and-restore, the
    rest of the Bitchunry just followed, a value-system settling over
    you. 
    </P>
    <P>Those who didn't take backup-and-restore may have
    objected, but, hey, they all died.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>The Liberty Square ad-hocs marched shoulder to shoulder through
    the utilidors and, as a mass, took back the Haunted Mansion. Dan,
    Lil and I were up front, careful not to brush against one another as
    we walked quickly through the backstage door and started a
    bucket-brigade, passing out the materials that Debra's
    people had stashed there, along a line that snaked back to the front
    porch of the Hall of Presidents, where they were unceremoniously
    dumped.</P>
    <P>Once the main stash was vacated, we split up and roamed the ride,
    its service corridors and dioramas, the break-room and the secret
    passages, rounding up every scrap of Debra's crap and
    passing it out the door.</P>
    <P>In the attic scene, I ran into Kim and three of her giggly little
    friends, their eyes glinting in the dim light. The gaggle of
    transhuman kids made my guts clench, made me think of Zed and of Lil
    and of my unmediated brain, and I had a sudden urge to shred them
    verbally.</P>
    <P>No.</P>
    <P>No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back what
    was ours, not punishing the interlopers. “Kim, I think
    you should leave,” I said, quietly.</P>
    <P>She snorted and gave me a dire look. “Who died and
    made you boss?” she said. Her
    friends thought it very brave, they made it clear with
    double-jointed hip-thrusts and glares.</P>
    <P>“Kim, you can leave now or you can leave later. The
    longer you wait, the worse it will be for you and your Whuffie. You
    blew it, and you're not a part of the Mansion anymore.
    Go home, go to Debra. Don't stay here, and don't
    come back. Ever.”</P>
    <P>Ever. Be cast out of this thing that you love, that you obsess
    over, that you worked for. “Now,” I said, quiet, dangerous, barely in control.</P>
    <P>They sauntered into the graveyard, hissing vitriol at me. Oh,
    they had lots of new material to post to the anti-me sites, messages
    that would get them Whuffie with people who thought I was the scum
    of the earth. A popular view, those days.</P>
    <P>I got out of the Mansion and looked at the bucket-brigade,
    followed it to the front of the Hall. The Park had been open for an
    hour, and a herd of guests watched the proceedings in confusion. The
    Liberty Square ad-hocs passed their loads around in clear
    embarrassment, knowing that they were violating every principle they
    cared about.</P>
    <P>As I watched, gaps appeared in the bucket-brigade as castmembers
    slipped away, faces burning scarlet with shame. At the Hall of
    Presidents, Debra presided over an orderly relocation of her things,
    a cheerful cadre of her castmembers quickly moving it all offstage.
    I didn't have to look at my handheld to know what was
    happening to our Whuffie.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised the
    placement of his telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system in
    minute detail, bossing a crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind her,
    double- and triple-checking it all.</P>
    <P>Suneep smiled at me when he caught sight of me, hand-scattering
    dust in the parlor.</P>
    <P>“Congratulations, sir,” he
    said, and shook my hand. “It was masterfully done.”</P>
    <P>“Thanks, Suneep. I'm not sure how
    masterful it was, but we got the job done, and that's
    what counts.”</P>
    <P>“Your partners, they're happier than
    I've seen them since this whole business started. I know
    how they feel!”</P>
    <P>My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, I
    wondered. Happy enough to get back together? My mood fell, even
    though a part of me said that Dan would never go back to her, not
    after all we'd been through together.</P>
    <P>“I'm glad you're glad. We
    couldn't have done it without you, and it looks like
    we'll be open for business in a week.”</P>
    <P>“Oh, I should think so. Are you coming to the party
    tonight?”</P>
    <P>Party? Probably something the Liberty Square ad-hocs were putting
    on. I would almost certainly be persona non grata. “I
    don't think so,” I
    said, carefully. “I'll probably work late
    here.”</P>
    <P>He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had no
    intention of being dragged to the party, he left off.</P>
    <P>And that's how I came to be in the Mansion at 2 a.m.
    the next morning, dozing in a backstage break room when I heard a
    commotion from the parlor. Festive voices, happy and loud, and I
    assumed it was Liberty Square ad-hocs coming back from their party.</P>
    <P>I roused myself and entered the parlor.</P>
    <P>Kim and her friends were there, pushing hand-trucks of Debra's
    gear. I got ready to shout something horrible at them, and that's
    when Debra came in. I moderated the shout to a snap, opened my mouth
    to speak, stopped.</P>
    <P>Behind Debra were Lil's parents, frozen these long
    years in their canopic jars in Kissimmee.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch9" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 9</H1>
    <P>Lil's parents went into their jars with little
    ceremony. I saw them just before they went in, when they stopped in
    at Lil's and my place to kiss her goodbye and wish her
    well.</P>
    <P>Tom and I stood awkwardly to the side while Lil and her mother
    held an achingly chipper and polite farewell.</P>
    <P>“So,” I said to Tom.
    “Deadheading.”</P>
    <P>He cocked an eyebrow. “Yup. Took the backup this
    morning.”</P>
    <P>Before coming to see their daughter, they'd taken
    their backups. When they woke, this event—everything
    following the backup—would never have happened for them.</P>
    <P>God, they were bastards.</P>
    <P>“When are you coming back?” I asked, keeping my castmember face on, carefully hiding away
    the disgust.</P>
    <P>'We'll be sampling monthly, just getting
    a digest dumped to us. When things look interesting enough, we'll
    come on back.” He waggled a finger
    at me. “I'll be keeping an eye on you and
    Lillian—you treat her right, you hear?”</P>
    <P>“We're sure going to miss you two around
    here,” I said.</P>
    <P>He pishtoshed and said, “You won't even
    notice we're gone. This is your world now—we're
    just getting out of the way for a while, letting you-all take a run
    at it. We wouldn't be going down if we didn't
    have faith in you two.”</P>
    <P>Lil and her mom kissed one last time. Her mother was more
    affectionate than I'd ever seen her, even to the point
    of tearing up a little. Here in this moment of vanishing
    consciousness, she could be whomever she wanted, knowing that it
    wouldn't matter the next time she awoke.</P>
    <P>“Julius,” she said,
    taking my hands, squeezing them. “You've got
    some wonderful times ahead of you—between Lil and the
    Park, you're going to have a tremendous experience, I
    just know it.” She was infinitely
    serene and compassionate, and I knew it didn't count.</P>
    <P>Still smiling, they got into their runabout and drove away to get
    the lethal injections, to become disembodied consciousnesses, to
    lose their last moments with their darling daughter.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>They were not happy to be returned from the dead. Their new
    bodies were impossibly young, pubescent and hormonal and doleful and
    kitted out in the latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and
    her pals, they made a solid mass of irate adolescence.</P>
    <P>“Just what the hell do you think you're
    doing?” Rita asked, shoving me hard
    in the chest. I stumbled back into my carefully scattered dust,
    raising a cloud.</P>
    <P>Rita came after me, but Tom held her back. “Julius, go
    away. Your actions are totally indefensible. Keep your mouth shut
    and go away.”</P>
    <P>I held up a hand, tried to wave away his words, opened my mouth
    to speak.</P>
    <P>“Don't say a word,” he said. “Leave. Now.”</P>
    <P>“<EM>Don't stay here and don't
    come back. Ever</EM>,” Kim said, an
    evil look on her face.</P>
    <P>“No,” I said. “No
    goddamn it no. You're going to hear me out, and then
    I'm going to get Lil and her people and they're
    going to back me up. That's not negotiable.”</P>
    <P>We stared at each other across the dim parlor. Debra made a
    twiddling motion and the lights came up full and harsh. The expertly
    crafted gloom went away and it was just a dusty room with a fake
    fireplace.</P>
    <P>“Let him speak,” Debra
    said. Rita folded her arms and glared.</P>
    <P>“I did some really awful things,” I said, keeping my head up, keeping my eyes on them. “I
    can't excuse them, and I don't ask you to
    forgive them. But that doesn't change the fact that
    we've put our hearts and souls into this place, and
    it's not right to take it from us. Can't we
    have one constant corner of the world, one bit frozen in time for
    the people who love it that way? Why does your success mean our
    failure?</P>
    <P>“Can't you see that we're
    carrying on your work? That we're tending a legacy you
    left us?”</P>
    <P>“Are you through?” Rita
    asked.</P>
    <P>I nodded.</P>
    <P>“This place is not a historical preserve, Julius,
    it's a ride. If you don't understand that,
    you're in the wrong place. It's not my
    goddamn fault that you decided that your stupidity was on my behalf,
    and it doesn't make it any less stupid. All you've
    done is confirm my worst fears.”</P>
    <P>Debra's mask of impartiality slipped. “You
    stupid, deluded asshole,” she said,
    softly. “You totter around, pissing and moaning about
    your little murder, your little health problems—yes,
    I've heard—your little fixation on keeping
    things the way they are. You need some perspective, Julius. You need
    to get away from here: Disney World isn't good for you
    and you're sure as hell not any good for Disney
    World.”</P>
    <P>It would have hurt less if I hadn't come to the same
    conclusion myself, somewhere along the way.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I found the ad-hoc at a Fort Wilderness campsite, sitting around
    a fire and singing, necking, laughing. The victory party. I trudged
    into the circle and hunted for Lil.</P>
    <P>She was sitting on a log, staring into the fire, a million miles
    away. Lord, she was beautiful when she fretted. I stood in front of
    her for a minute and she stared right through me until I tapped her
    shoulder. She gave an involuntary squeak and then smiled at herself.</P>
    <P>“Lil,” I said, then
    stopped. <EM>Your parents are home, and they've joined
    the other side</EM>.</P>
    <P>For the first time in an age, she looked at me softly, smiled
    even. She patted the log next to her. I sat down, felt the heat of
    the fire on my face, her body heat on my side. God, how did I screw
    this up?</P>
    <P>Without warning, she put her arms around me and hugged me hard. I
    hugged her back, nose in her hair, woodsmoke smell and shampoo and
    sweat. “We did it,” she
    whispered fiercely. I held onto her. <EM>No, we didn't</EM>.</P>
    <P>“Lil,” I said again,
    and pulled away.</P>
    <P>“What?” she said, her
    eyes shining. She was stoned, I saw that now.</P>
    <P>“Your parents are back. They came to the Mansion.”</P>
    <P>She was confused, shrinking, and I pressed on.</P>
    <P>“They were with Debra.”</P>
    <P>She reeled back as if I'd slapped her.</P>
    <P>“I told them I'd bring the whole group
    back to talk it over.”</P>
    <P>She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put
    an arm around her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and
    laughing at the same time. “I'll have a ferry
    sent over,” she said.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I sat in the back of the ferry with Dan, away from the confused
    and angry ad-hocs. I answered his questions with terse, one-word
    answers, and he gave up. We rode in silence, the trees on the edges
    of the Seven Seas Lagoon whipping back and forth in an approaching
    storm.</P>
    <P>The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and moved
    through the quiet streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral
    procession that stopped the nighttime custodial staff in their
    tracks.</P>
    <P>As we drew up on Liberty Square, I saw that the work-lights were
    blazing and a tremendous work-gang of Debra's ad-hocs
    were moving from the Hall to the Mansion, undoing our teardown of
    their work.</P>
    <P>Working alongside of them were Tom and Rita, Lil's
    parents, sleeves rolled up, forearms bulging with new, toned muscle.
    The group stopped in its tracks and Lil went to them, stumbling on
    the wooden sidewalk.</P>
    <P>I expected hugs. There were none. In their stead, parents and
    daughter stalked each other, shifting weight and posture to track
    each other, maintain a constant, sizing distance.</P>
    <P>“What the hell are you doing?” Lil said, finally. She didn't address her mother,
    which surprised me. It didn't surprise Tom, though.</P>
    <P>He dipped forward, the shuffle of his feet loud in the quiet
    night. “We're working,” he said.</P>
    <P>“No, you're not,” Lil said. “You're destroying. Stop
    it.”</P>
    <P>Lil's mother darted to her husband's
    side, not saying anything, just standing there.</P>
    <P>Wordlessly, Tom hefted the box he was holding and headed to the
    Mansion. Lil caught his arm and jerked it so he dropped his load.</P>
    <P>“You're not listening. The Mansion is
    <EM>ours</EM>. <EM>Stop</EM>. <EM>It</EM>.”</P>
    <P>Lil's mother gently took Lil's hand off
    Tom's arm, held it in her own. “I'm
    glad you're passionate about it, Lillian,” she said. “I'm proud of your
    commitment.”</P>
    <P>Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil's choked
    sob, saw her collapse in on herself. Her mother took her in her
    arms, rocked her. I felt like a voyeur, but couldn't
    bring myself to turn away.</P>
    <P>“Shhh,” her mother
    said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling of the leaves on
    the Liberty Tree. “Shhh. We don't have to be
    on the same side, you know.”</P>
    <P>They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then
    bent again and picked up her father's box, carried it to
    the Mansion. One at a time, the rest of her ad-hoc moved forward and
    joined them.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend's
    hotel room and you power up your handheld and it won't
    log on. You press the call-button for the elevator and it gives you
    an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one
    looks at you as they jostle past you.</P>
    <P>You become a non-person.</P>
    <P>Scared. I trembled when I ascended the stairs to Dan's
    room, when I knocked at his door, louder and harder than I meant, a
    panicked banging.</P>
    <P>Dan answered the door and I saw his eyes go to his HUD, back to
    me. “Jesus,” he said.</P>
    <P>I sat on the edge of my bed, head in my hands.</P>
    <P>“What?” I said, what
    happened, what happened to me?</P>
    <P>“You're out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You're out of Whuffie.
    You're bottomed-out,” he
    said.</P>
    <P>This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with
    the hissing of the monorail and the sun streaming through the
    window, the hooting of the steam engines on the railroad and the
    distant howl of the recorded wolves at the Haunted Mansion. The
    world drops away from you, recedes until you're nothing
    but a speck, a mote in blackness.</P>
    <P>I was hyperventilating, light-headed. Deliberately, I slowed my
    breath, put my head between my knees until the dizziness passed.</P>
    <P>“Take me to Lil,” I
    said.</P>
    <P>Driving together, hammering cigarette after cigarette into my
    face, I remembered the night Dan had come to Disney World, when
    I'd driven him to my—<EM>Lil's</EM>—house,
    and how happy I'd been then, how secure.</P>
    <P>I looked at Dan and he patted my hand. “Strange
    times,” he said.</P>
    <P>It was enough. We found Lil in an underground break-room, lightly
    dozing on a ratty sofa. Her head rested on Tom's lap,
    her feet on Rita's. All three snored softly. They'd
    had a long night.</P>
    <P>Dan shook Lil awake. She stretched out and opened her eyes,
    looked sleepily at me. The blood drained from her face.</P>
    <P>“Hello, Julius,” she
    said, coldly.</P>
    <P>Now Tom and Rita were awake, too. Lil sat up.</P>
    <P>“Were you going to tell me?” I asked, quietly. “Or were you just going to kick
    me out and let me find out on my own?”</P>
    <P>“You were my next stop,” Lil
    said.</P>
    <P>“Then I've saved you some time.” I pulled up a chair. “Tell me all about it.”</P>
    <P>“There's nothing to tell,” Rita snapped. “You're out. You had to
    know it was coming—for God's sake, you were
    tearing Liberty Square apart!”</P>
    <P>“How would you know?” I
    asked. I struggled to remain calm. “You've
    been asleep for ten years!”</P>
    <P>“We got updates,” Rita
    said. “That's why we're back—we
    couldn't let it go on the way it was. We owed it to
    Debra.”</P>
    <P>“And Lillian,” Tom
    said.</P>
    <P>“And Lillian,” Rita
    said, absently.</P>
    <P>Dan pulled up a chair of his own. “You're
    not being fair to him,” he said. At
    least someone was on my side.</P>
    <P>“We've been more than fair,” Lil said. “You know that better than anyone, Dan.
    We've forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, made every
    allowance. He's sick and he won't take the
    cure. There's nothing more we can do for him.”</P>
    <P>“You could be his friend,” Dan said. The light-headedness was back, and I slumped in my
    chair, tried to control my breathing, the panicked thumping of my
    heart.</P>
    <P>“You could try to understand, you could try to help
    him. You could stick with him, the way he stuck with you. You
    don't have to toss him out on his ass.”</P>
    <P>Lil had the good grace to look slightly shamed. “I'll
    get him a room,” she said. “For
    a month. In Kissimmee. A motel. I'll pick up his network
    access. Is that fair?”</P>
    <P>“It's more than fair,” Rita said. Why did she hate me so much? I'd been
    there for her daughter while she was away—ah. That might
    do it, all right. “I don't think it's
    warranted. If you want to take care of him, sir, you can. It's
    none of my family's business.”</P>
    <P>Lil's eyes blazed. “Let me handle this,” she said. “All right?”</P>
    <P>Rita stood up abruptly. “You do whatever you want,” she said, and stormed out of the room.</P>
    <P>“Why are you coming here for help?” Tom said, ever the voice of reason. “You seem
    capable enough.”</P>
    <P>“I'm going to be taking a lethal injection
    at the end of the week,” Dan said.
    “Three days. That's personal, but you
    asked.”</P>
    <P>Tom shook his head. <EM>Some friends you've got
    yourself</EM>, I could see him thinking it.</P>
    <P>“That soon?” Lil
    asked, a throb in her voice.</P>
    <P>Dan nodded.</P>
    <P>In a dreamlike buzz, I stood and wandered out into the utilidor,
    out through the western castmember parking, and away.</P>
    <P>I wandered along the cobbled, disused Walk Around the World, each
    flagstone engraved with the name of a family that had visited the
    Park a century before. The names whipped past me like epitaphs.</P>
    <P>The sun came up noon high as I rounded the bend of deserted beach
    between the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian. Lil and I had come
    here often, to watch the sunset from a hammock, arms around each
    other, the Park spread out before us like a lighted toy village.</P>
    <P>Now the beach was deserted, the Wedding Pavilion silent. I felt
    suddenly cold though I was sweating freely. So cold.</P>
    <P>Dreamlike, I walked into the lake, water filling my shoes,
    logging my pants, warm as blood, warm on my chest, on my chin, on my
    mouth, on my eyes.</P>
    <P>I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply, water filling my lungs,
    choking and warm. At first I sputtered, but I was in control now,
    and I inhaled again. The water shimmered over my eyes, and then was
    dark.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I woke on Doctor Pete's cot in the Magic Kingdom,
    restraints around my wrists and ankles, a tube in my nose. I closed
    my eyes, for a moment believing that I'd been restored
    from a backup, problems solved, memories behind me.</P>
    <P>Sorrow knifed through me as I realized that Dan was probably dead
    by now, my memories of him gone forever.</P>
    <P>Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically. The fact
    that I remembered Dan meant that I hadn't been refreshed
    from my backup, that my broken brain was still there, churning along
    in unmediated isolation.</P>
    <P>I coughed again. My ribs ached and throbbed in counterpoint to my
    head. Dan took my hand.</P>
    <P>“You're a pain in the ass, you know
    that?” he said, smiling.</P>
    <P>“Sorry,” I choked.</P>
    <P>“You sure are,” he
    said. “Lucky for you they found you—another
    minute or two and I'd be burying you right now.”</P>
    <P><EM>No</EM>, I thought, confused. <EM>They'd have
    restored me from backup</EM>. Then it hit me: I'd gone
    on record refusing restore from backup after having it recommended
    by a medical professional. No one would have restored me after that.
    I would have been truly and finally dead. I started to shiver.</P>
    <P>“Easy,” Dan said.
    “Easy. It's all right now. Doctor says
    you've got a cracked rib or two from the CPR, but
    there's no brain damage.”</P>
    <P>“No <EM>additional</EM> brain damage,” Doctor Pete said, swimming into view. He had on his
    professionally calm bedside face, and it reassured me despite
    myself.</P>
    <P>He shooed Dan away and took his seat. Once Dan had left the room,
    he shone lights in my eyes and peeked in my ears, then sat back and
    considered me. “Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the problem? We can get
    you a lethal injection if that's what you want, but
    offing yourself in the Seven Seas Lagoon just isn't good
    show. In the meantime, would you like to talk about it?”</P>
    <P>Part of me wanted to spit in his eye. I'd tried to
    talk about it and he'd told me to go to hell, and now he
    changes his mind? But I did want to talk.</P>
    <P>“I didn't want to die,” I said.</P>
    <P>“Oh no?” he said.
    “I think the evidence suggests the contrary.”</P>
    <P>“I wasn't trying to die,” I protested. “I was trying to—” What? I was trying to… <EM>abdicate</EM>.
    Take the refresh without choosing it, without shutting out the last
    year of my best friend's life. Rescue myself from the
    stinking pit I'd sunk into without flushing Dan away
    along with it. That's all, that's all.</P>
    <P>“I wasn't thinking—I was just
    acting. It was an episode or something. Does that mean I'm
    nuts?”</P>
    <P>“Oh, probably,” Doctor
    Pete said, offhandedly. “But let's worry
    about one thing at a time. You can die if you want to, that's
    your right. I'd rather you lived, if you want my
    opinion, and I doubt that I'm the only one, Whuffie be
    damned. If you're going to live, I'd like to
    record you saying so, just in case. We have a backup of you on
    file—I'd hate to have to delete it.”</P>
    <P>“Yes,” I said.
    “Yes, I'd like to be restored if there's
    no other option.” It was true. I
    didn't want to die.</P>
    <P>“All right then,” Doctor
    Pete said. “It's on file and I'm
    a happy man. Now, are you nuts? Probably. A little. Nothing a little
    counseling and some R&amp;R wouldn't fix, if you want my
    opinion. I could find you somewhere if you want.”</P>
    <P>“Not yet,” I said.
    “I appreciate the offer, but there's
    something else I have to do first.”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermal
    soporific that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke,
    the moon was over the Seven Seas Lagoon and the monorail was silent.</P>
    <P>I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things
    this place had meant to me for more than a century: happiness,
    security, efficiency, fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left.
    Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I could make her happy
    again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead—God, it was
    sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down to the Cape
    for a launch.</P>
    <P>“What's on your mind?” Dan asked from behind me, startling me. He was in his boxers,
    thin and rangy and hairy.</P>
    <P>“Thinking about moving on,” I said.</P>
    <P>He chuckled. “I've been thinking about
    doing the same,” he said.</P>
    <P>I smiled. “Not that way,” I
    said. “Just going somewhere else, starting over. Getting
    away from this.”</P>
    <P>“Going to take the refresh?” he asked.</P>
    <P>I looked away. “No,” I
    said. “I don't believe I will.”</P>
    <P>“It may be none of my business,” he said, “but why the fuck not? Jesus, Julius,
    what're you afraid of?”</P>
    <P>“You don't want to know,” I said.</P>
    <P>“I'll be the judge of that.”</P>
    <P>“Let's have a drink, first,” I said.</P>
    <P>Dan rolled his eyes back for a second, then said, “All
    right, two Coronas, coming up.”</P>
    <P>After the room-service bot had left, we cracked the beers and
    pulled chairs out onto the porch.</P>
    <P>“You sure you want to know this?” I asked.</P>
    <P>He tipped his bottle at me. “Sure as shootin',” he said.</P>
    <P>“I don't want refresh because it would
    mean losing the last year,” I said.</P>
    <P>He nodded. “By which you mean ‘my last
    year,’” he said.
    “Right?”</P>
    <P>I nodded and drank.</P>
    <P>“I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many
    things, but hard to figure out you are not. I have something to say
    that might help you make the decision. If you want to hear it, that
    is.”</P>
    <P>What could he have to say? “Sure,” I said. “Sure.” In
    my mind, I was on a shuttle headed for orbit, away from all of this.</P>
    <P>“I had you killed,” he
    said. “Debra asked me to, and I set it up. You were right
    all along.”</P>
    <P>The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun
    away from it. I opened and shut my mouth.</P>
    <P>It was Dan's turn to look away. “Debra
    proposed it. We were talking about the people I'd met
    when I was doing my missionary work, the stone crazies who I'd
    have to chase away after they'd rejoined the Bitchun
    Society. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followed me
    down here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and that's
    when she got the idea.</P>
    <P>“I'd get the girl to shoot you and
    disappear. Debra would give me Whuffie—piles of it, and
    her team would follow suit. I'd be months closer to my
    goal. That was all I could think about back then, you remember.”</P>
    <P>“I remember.” The
    smell of rejuve and desperation in our little cottage, and Dan
    plotting my death.</P>
    <P>“We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from
    a backup—no memory of the event, just the Whuffie for
    me.”</P>
    <P>“Yes,” I said. That
    would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, have yourself refreshed
    from a backup made before the plan. How many times had Debra done
    terrible things and erased their memories that way?</P>
    <P>“Yes,” he agreed.
    “We did it, I'm ashamed to say. I can prove
    it, too—I have my backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell
    it, too.” He drained his beer.
    “That's my plan. Tomorrow. I'll
    tell Lil and her folks, Kim and her people, the whole ad-hoc. A
    going-away present from a shitty friend.”</P>
    <P>My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. “You
    knew all along,” I said. “You
    could have proved it at any time.”</P>
    <P>He nodded. “That's right.”</P>
    <P>“You let me…” I groped for the words. “You let me turn
    into…” They
    wouldn't come.</P>
    <P>“I did,” he said.</P>
    <P>All this time. Lil and he, standing on <EM>my</EM> porch, telling
    me I needed help. Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from
    backup, me saying no, no, no, not wanting to lose my last year with
    Dan.</P>
    <P>“I've done some pretty shitty things in my
    day,” he said. “This is
    the absolute worst. You helped me and I betrayed you. I'm
    sure glad I don't believe in God—that'd
    make what I'm going to do even scarier.”</P>
    <P>Dan was going to kill himself in two days' time. My
    friend and my murderer. “Dan,” I croaked. I couldn't make any sense of my mind.
    Dan, taking care of me, helping me, sticking up for me, carrying
    this horrible shame with him all along. Ready to die, wanting to go
    with a clean conscience.</P>
    <P>“You're forgiven,” I said. And it was true.</P>
    <P>He stood.</P>
    <P>“Where are you going” I
    asked.</P>
    <P>“To find Jeanine, the one who pulled the trigger.
    I'll meet you at the Hall of Presidents at nine a.m..”</P>
    <HR>
    <P>I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, a
    Guest with barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water
    fountains and stand in line. If I were lucky, a castmember might
    spare me a chocolate banana. Probably not, though.</P>
    <P>I stood in the line for the Hall of Presidents. Other guests
    checked my Whuffie, then averted their eyes. Even the children. A
    year before, they'd have been striking up conversations,
    asking me about my job here at the Magic Kingdom.</P>
    <P>I sat in my seat at the Hall of Presidents, watching the short
    film with the rest, sitting patiently while they rocked in their
    seats under the blast of the flash-bake. A castmember picked up the
    stageside mic and thanked everyone for coming; the doors swung open
    and the Hall was empty, except for me. The castmember narrowed her
    eyes at me, then recognizing me, turned her back and went to show in
    the next group.</P>
    <P>No group came. Instead, Dan and the girl I'd seen on
    the replay entered.</P>
    <P>“We've closed it down for the morning,” he said.</P>
    <P>I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the
    trigger on me, seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression.
    She was terrified of me.</P>
    <P>“You must be Jeanine,” I
    said. I stood and shook her hand. “I'm
    Julius.”</P>
    <P>Her hand was cold, and she took it back and wiped it on her
    pants.</P>
    <P>My castmember instincts took over. “Please, have a
    seat. Don't worry, it'll all be fine.
    Really. No hard feelings.” I
    stopped short of offering to get her a glass of water.</P>
    <P><EM>Put her at her ease</EM>, said a snotty voice in my head.
    <EM>She'll make a better witness. Or make her nervous,
    pathetic—that'll work, too; make Debra look
    even worse</EM>.</P>
    <P>I told the voice to shut up and got her a cup of water.</P>
    <P>By the time I came back, the whole gang was there. Debra, Lil,
    her folks, Tim. Debra's gang and Lil's gang,
    now one united team. Soon to be scattered.</P>
    <P>Dan took the stage, used the stageside mic to broadcast his
    voice. “Eleven months ago, I did an awful thing. I
    plotted with Debra to have Julius murdered. I used a friend who was
    a little confused at the time, used her to pull the trigger. It was
    Debra's idea that having Julius killed would cause
    enough confusion that she could take over the Hall of Presidents. It
    was.”</P>
    <P>There was a roar of conversation. I looked at Debra, saw that she
    was sitting calmly, as though Dan had just accused her of sneaking
    an extra helping of dessert. Lil's parents, to either
    side of her, were less sanguine. Tom's jaw was set and
    angry, Rita was speaking angrily to Debra. Hickory Jackson in the
    old Hall used to say, <EM>I will hang the first man I can lay hands
    on from the first tree I can find</EM>.</P>
    <P>“Debra had herself refreshed from backup after we
    planned it,” Dan went on, as though
    no one was talking. “I was supposed to do the same, but I
    didn't. I have a backup in my public directory—anyone
    can examine it. Right now, I'd like to bring Jeanine up,
    she's got a few words she'd like to say.”</P>
    <P>I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the
    ad-hocs were an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself,
    I was enjoying it.</P>
    <P>“Hello,” Jeanine said
    softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely face. I wondered if we
    could be friends when it was all over. She probably didn't
    care much about Whuffie, one way or another.</P>
    <P>The discussion went on. Dan took the mic from her and said,
    “Please! Can we have a little respect for our visitor?
    Please? People?”</P>
    <P>Gradually, the din decreased. Dan passed the mic back to Jeanine.
    “Hello,” she said again,
    and flinched from the sound of her voice in the Hall's
    PA. “My name is Jeanine. I'm the one who
    killed Julius, a year ago. Dan asked me to, and I did it. I didn't
    ask why. I trusted—trust—him. He told me
    that Julius would make a backup a few minutes before I shot him, and
    that he could get me out of the Park without getting caught. I'm
    very sorry.” There was something
    off-kilter about her, some stilt to her stance and words that let
    you know she wasn't all there. Growing up in a mountain
    might do that to you. I snuck a look at Lil, whose lips were pressed
    together. Growing up in a theme park might do that to you, too.</P>
    <P>“Thank you, Jeanine,” Dan
    said, taking back the mic. “You can have a seat now.
    I've said everything I need to say—Julius
    and I have had our own discussions in private. If there's
    anyone else who'd like to speak—”</P>
    <P>The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd erupted
    again in words and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I took
    her hand and shouted in her ear: “Have you ever been on
    the Pirates of the Carribean?”</P>
    <P>She shook her head.</P>
    <P>I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “You'll
    love it,” I said, and led her out
    of the Hall.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ch10" dir="LTR">
    <H1>CHAPTER 10</H1>
    <P>I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on
    a fresh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen
    lapu-lapus in hollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea
    of getting drunk.</P>
    <P>Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes
    like saucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand,
    never averting her attention from the floor show. When they danced
    the fast hula, her eyes jiggled. I chuckled.</P>
    <P>From where we sat, I could see the spot where I'd
    waded into the Seven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp
    water, I could see Cinderella's Castle, across the
    lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses
    making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses of
    guests from place to place. Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I
    toasted him back, drank it dry and belched in satisfaction.</P>
    <P>Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of
    tawny, half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society,
    anyway?</P>
    <P>When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my
    toes dug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my
    left hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the
    lighted barges puttered away through the night, we three sat in the
    hammock.</P>
    <P>I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this
    was my last night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot
    again, start afresh. That's what the Park was for, only
    somehow, this visit, I'd gotten stuck. Dan had unstuck
    me.</P>
    <P>The talk turned to Dan's impending death.</P>
    <P>“So, tell me what you think of this,” he said, hauling away on a glowing cigarette.</P>
    <P>“Shoot,” I said.</P>
    <P>“I'm thinking—why take lethal
    injection? I mean, I may be done here for now, but why should I make
    an irreversible decision?”</P>
    <P>“Why did you want to before?” I asked.</P>
    <P>“Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and
    all. But hell, I don't have to prove anything, right?”</P>
    <P>“Sure,” I said,
    magnanimously.</P>
    <P>“So,” he said,
    thoughtfully. “The question I'm asking is,
    how long can I deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a
    thousand years, ten thousand, right?”</P>
    <P>“So, you're thinking, what, a million?” I joked.</P>
    <P>He laughed. “A <EM>million</EM>? You're
    thinking too small, son. Try this on for size: the heat death of the
    universe.”</P>
    <P>“The heat death of the universe,” I repeated.</P>
    <P>“Sure,” he drawled,
    and I sensed his grin in the dark. “Ten to the hundred
    years or so. The Stelliferous Period—it's
    when all the black holes have run dry and things get, you know,
    stupendously dull. Cold, too. So I'm thinking—why
    not leave a wake-up call for some time around then?”</P>
    <P>“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I
    said. “Brrrr.”</P>
    <P>“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based
    canopic jar, mass enough to feed it—say, a trillion-ton
    asteroid—and a lot of solitude when the time comes
    around. I'll poke my head in every century or so, just
    to see what's what, but if nothing really stupendous
    crops up, I'll take the long ride out. The final
    frontier.”</P>
    <P>“That's pretty cool,” Jeanine said.</P>
    <P>“Thanks,” Dan said.</P>
    <P>“You're not kidding, are you?” I asked.</P>
    <P>“Nope, I sure ain't,” he said.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>They didn't invite me back into the ad-hoc, even
    after Debra left in Whuffie-penury and they started to put the
    Mansion back the way it was. Tim called me to say that with enough
    support from Imagineering, they thought they could get it up and
    running in a week. Suneep was ready to kill someone, I swear. <EM>A
    house divided against itself can</EM>not <EM>stand</EM>, as Mr.
    Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents.</P>
    <P>I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my
    shoulderbag and checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten
    a.m., then met Jeanine and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan
    had a runabout he'd picked up with my Whuffie, and I
    piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played old Beatles tunes on
    the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at
    noon.</P>
    <P>The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd
    been through decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan,
    nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless
    treated us to a meal in the big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze
    and steaky paste, and we watched the universe get colder for a
    while.</P>
    <P>There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set
    of tubs, and they weren't half bad.</P>
    <P>Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd
    gone to space with her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it
    was in a long-haul generation ship. She'd abandoned it
    after a year or two and deadheaded back to Earth in a support-pod.
    She'd get used to life in space after a while. Or she
    wouldn't.</P>
    <P>“Well,” Dan said.</P>
    <P>“Yup,” I said, aping
    his laconic drawl. He smiled.</P>
    <P>“It's that time,” he said.</P>
    <P>Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and
    I brushed them away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd
    developed some real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her
    since I'd watched her saucer-eye her way through the
    Magic Kingdom. No romance—not for me, thanks! But
    camaraderie and a sense of responsibility.</P>
    <P>“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started after him, but
    Jeanine caught my hand.</P>
    <P>“He hates long good-byes,” she said.</P>
    <P>“I know,” I said, and
    watched him go.</P>
    <HR>
    <P>The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in
    redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space
    or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write
    out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be
    when it's restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen.
    It's important that whoever I am then knows about this
    year, and it's going to take a lot of tries for me to
    get it right.</P>
    <P>In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one
    with a little bit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It's a Small World After
    All,” and especially “There's
    a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”</P>
    <P>Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she
    know? She's barely fifty.</P>
    <P>We've both got a lot of living to do before we know
    what's what.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ack" dir="LTR">
    <H1>Acknowledgements:</H1>
    <P>I could never have written this book without the personal support
    of my friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and
    Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad
    Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street
    Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder.</P>
    <P>I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and
    encouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight,
    Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa
    Nielsen Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer.</P>
    <P>I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my
    agent Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it
    to fruition.</P>
    <P>Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers
    who inspired this book.</P>
    <P>Cory Doctorow</P>
    <P>San Francisco</P>
    <P>September 2002</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="ata" dir="LTR">
    <H1>About the author:</H1>
    <P>Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier
    Foundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at
    www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing
    Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a
    month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the
    2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San
    Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about
    long walks on the beach.</P>
</DIV>
<DIV id="alsoby" dir="LTR">
    <H1>Other books by Cory Doctorow:</H1>
    <UL>
        <LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><I>A Place So Foreign and Eight
        More</I><BR>– short story collection, forthcoming
        from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003, with an introduction by
        Bruce Sterling 
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P style="margin-bottom: 0in"><I>Essential Blogging</I>,
        O'Reilly and Associates, 2002<BR>– with
        Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and
        Mena G. Trott 
        </P>
        </LI><LI><P><I>The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing
        Science Fiction</I>, Alpha Books, 2000<BR>–
        co-written with Karl Schroeder 
        </P>
    </LI></UL>
</DIV>
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   <dc:title>Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom</dc:title>
   <dc:date>2003-1-9</dc:date>
   <dc:description>A novel by Cory Doctorow:

Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.

Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long&#45;ago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer "ad&#45;hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high&#45;tech touches.

Now, though, it seems the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct&#45;to&#45;brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of ever&#45;shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes.

Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom reads like Neal Stephenson meets Nick Hornby: a coming&#45;of&#45;age romantic comedy and a kick&#45;butt cybernetic tour de force.
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